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Otto Hahn. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1944. Born: 8 March 1879, Frankfurt-on-the-Main, Germany. Died: 28 July 1968, Göttingen, West Germany (now Germany) Affiliation at the time of the award: Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut (now Max-Planck Institut) für Chemie, Berlin-Dahlem, Germany.
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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1944 was awarded to Otto Hahn "for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei"
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1944 was awarded to Otto Hahn "for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei". Otto Hahn received his Nobel Prize one year later, in 1945. During the selection process in 1944, the Nobel Committee for Chemistry decided that none of the year's nominations met the criteria as outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel.
He also discovered the phenomena of atomic recoil and nuclear isomerism, and pioneered rubidium–strontium dating. In 1938, Hahn, Meitner and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission, for which Hahn alone, was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
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Otto Hahn (born March 8, 1879, Frankfurt am Main, Ger.—died July 28, 1968, Göttingen, W.Ger.) German chemist who, with the radiochemist Fritz Strassmann, is credited with the discovery of nuclear fission. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944 and shared the Enrico Fermi Award in 1966 with Strassmann and Lise Meitner.
Hahn was the son of a glazier. Although his parents wanted him to become an architect, he eventually decided to study chemistry at the University of Marburg. There Hahn worked hard at chemistry, though he was inclined to absent himself from physics and mathematics lectures in favour of art and philosophy, and he obtained his doctorate in 1901. After a year of military service, he returned to the university as chemistry lecture assistant, hoping to find a post in industry later on.
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In 1904 he went to London, primarily to learn English, and worked at University College with Sir William Ramsay, who was interested in radioactivity. While working on a crude radium preparation that Ramsay had given to him to purify, Hahn showed that a new radioactive substance, which he called radiothorium, was present. Fired by this early success and encouraged by Ramsay, who thought highly of him, he decided to continue with research on radioactivity rather than go into industry. With Ramsay’s support he obtained a post at the University of Berlin. Before taking it up, he decided to spend several months in Montreal with Ernest Rutherford (later Lord Rutherford of Nelson) to gain further experience with radioactivity. Shortly after returning to Germany in 1906, Hahn was joined by Lise Meitner, an Austrian-born physicist, and five years later they moved to the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry at Berlin-Dahlen. There Hahn became head of a small but independent department of radiochemistry.
Feeling that his future was more secure, Hahn married Edith Junghans, the daughter of the chairman of Stettin City Council, in 1913; but World War I broke out the next year, and Hahn was posted to a regiment. In 1915 he became a chemical-warfare specialist, serving on all the European fronts.
After the war, Hahn and Meitner were among the first to isolate protactinium-231, an isotope of the recently discovered radioactive element protactinium. Because nearly all the natural radioactive elements had then been discovered, he devoted the next 12 years to studies on the application of radioactive methods to chemical problems.
In 1934 Hahn became keenly interested in the work of the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who found that when the heaviest natural element, uranium, is bombarded by neutrons, several radioactive products are formed. Fermi supposed these products to be artificial elements similar to uranium. Hahn and Meitner, assisted by the young Strassmann, obtained results that at first seemed in accord with Fermi’s interpretation but that became increasingly difficult to understand. Meitner fled from Germany in July 1938 to escape the persecution of Jews by the Nazis, but Hahn and Strassmann continued the work. By the end of 1938, they obtained conclusive evidence, contrary to previous expectation, that one of the products from uranium was a radioactive form of the much lighter element barium, indicating that the uranium atom had split into two lighter atoms. Hahn sent an account of the work to Meitner, who, in cooperation with her nephew Otto Frisch, formulated a plausible explanation of the process, to which they gave the name nuclear fission.
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The tremendous implications of this discovery were realized by scientists before the outbreak of World War II, and a group was formed in Germany to study possible military developments. Much to Hahn’s relief, he was allowed to continue with his own researches. After the war, he and other German nuclear scientists were taken to England, where he learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for 1944 and was profoundly affected by the announcement of the explosion of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima in 1945. Although now aged 66, he was still a vigorous man; a lifelong mountaineer, he maintained physical fitness during the enforced stay in England by a daily run.
- Robert Spence
Hahn was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. Hahn and Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin bombarded uranium with slow neutrons and discovered that barium had been produced.
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Otto Hahn (1879 – 1968) was a German chemist and winner of the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of nuclear fission. Hahn was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry and is widely regarded as the “father of nuclear chemistry.”
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