Rudolf Peierls
Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, CBE (5 June 1907 – 19 September 1995) was a German-born British physicist who had a major role in Britain's nuclear programme, and also had a role in many modern sciences. His obituary in Physics Today describes him as "a major player in the drama of the eruption of nuclear physics into world affairs...".
The son of Jewish parents, he assisted Egon Orowan in understanding the force required to move a dislocation which would be expanded on by Frank Nabarro and called the Peierls–Nabarro force. In 1929, he studied solid-state physics in Zurich under the tutelage of Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli. His early work on quantum physics led to the theory of positive carriers to explain the thermal and electrical conductivity behaviours of semiconductors. He was a pioneer of the concept of "holes" in semiconductors. He actually established "zones" before Léon Brillouin, despite Brillouin's name being currently attached to the idea, and applied it to phonons. Doing this, he discovered the Boltzmann equations for phonons and the Umklapp process. Physics Today states "His many papers on electrons in metals have now passed so deeply into the literature that it is hard to identify his contribution to conductivity in magnetic fields and to the concept of a hole in the theory of electrons in solids".
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