Polykarp Kusch

Born Jan. 26, 1911, in Blankenburg, Germany. American physicist.

Kusch graduated from Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland in 1931. Between 1931 and 1941 he taught at the universities of Illinois and Minnesota and New York University. He was an engineer with Westinghouse from 1941 to 1942 and worked in the Columbia University laboratories from 1942 to 1944. He worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1944 to 1946. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1946 and was appointed professor there in 1949.

Kusch’s major work has been in nuclear physics and the physics of elementary particles. Using magnetic resonance in atomic beams, he obtained a value for the intrinsic magnetic moment of an electron that agreed closely with the theoretical value calculated on the basis of modern quantum electrodynamics. Kusch was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1955 (jointly with W. Lamb).