Hans Dehmelt

Hans Dehmelt received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 for his development of the ion trap technique, used for high precision measurement of the electron g-factor. Dehmelt was born in Germany. From his school days in Berlin, he was fascinated by radio technology. He began his university training in physics while serving in the German Army during World War II, but was captured by American forces at the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he supported himself in graduate school by repairing and bartering old, pre-war radios. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Gottingen, where he participated in the discovery of Nuclear Quadropole Resonance. He was invited to join the microwave laboratory at Duke University in North Carolina, and emigrated to the United States in 1952. He later became a Professor of Physics at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he performed the experiments that earned him his Nobel Prize. At the Academy of Achievement's 1990 Summit in Chicago, heard in this podcast, he gave a fascinating account of his lifelong study of the electron. He continued his research through the end of his career. In 1979, his team at the University of Washington were the first to record a photographic image of a single atom. He retired from the University of Washington in 2002.