Peierls, Rudolf Ernst

Born June 5, 1907, in Berlin. British physicist. Member of the London Royal Society (1945).

Peierls studied at the universities of Berlin, Munich, and Leipzig. From 1929 to 1932 he was an assistant of W. Pauli in Zürich. In 1933, after the establishment of the fascist regime in Germany, he moved to Great Britain. Peierls was affiliated with the University of Manchester until 1935 and with the Mond Laboratory in London from 1935 to 1937. He was a professor at the University of Birmingham from 1937 to 1963, when he became a professor at the University of Oxford.

Peierls developed an approximate quantum mechanical theory of electron motion in a three-dimensional lattice in 1929 and 1930. Also in 1930, he introduced the notion of Umklapp processes in the interaction of electrons with lattice waves. Together with H. Bethe, he developed the theory of the neutron-proton system in 1934 and 1935. Peierls advanced a general formalism for the theory of the scattering of elementary particles between 1954 and 1959. From 1943 to 1946 he headed theoretical work on the separation of isotopes in the USA.