Otto Laporte

Otto Laporte (July 23, 1902 – March 28, 1971) was a German-born American physicist who made contributions to quantum mechanics, electromagnetic wave propagation theory, spectroscopy, and fluid dynamics. His name is lent to the Laporte rule in spectroscopy and to the Otto Laporte Award of the American Physical Society.

Laporte’s ancestors came from French Huguenot families who fled to Switzerland in the 17th century. His father was an officer in the military. Before World War I, they were stationed in the fortified cities of Mainz (where Laporte was born), Cologne, and Metz, in which he received his early education. After the war started, they returned to Mainz.

In the spring of 1920, the family moved to Frankfurt, staying just one year, where Laporte attended the University of Frankfurt. There, he was influenced by the mathematicians Arthur Schoenflies, Ludwig Bieberbach, and Ernst Hellinger, and the physicists Max Born, and Alfred Landé. In the summer of 1921, the Laporte family moved to Munich, where Laporte became a student of Arnold Sommerfeld at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (LMU). Max Born had sent an enthusiastic recommendation of Laporte to Sommerfeld. At that time, Wolfgang Pauli was an assistant to Sommerfeld and Sommerfeld’s students included Werner Heisenberg, Gregor Wentzel, Karl Herzfeld, and Paul Peter Ewald – all of whom would go on to become famous physicists in their own right. Laporte’s first independent research was on the diffraction of electromagnetic waves around a spherical body and this was the basis for his doctoral thesis under Sommerfeld. His doctorate was granted in 1924. While at LMU, he also analyzed various spectra and made a contribution to understanding atomic structure. Through these research efforts, he discovered what is known in spectroscopy as the Laporte rule.

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