Biography Base Home Link To Us Search Biographies: Browse Biographies A B C D ... Z Walther Bothe Biography Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (January 8, 1891 - February 8, 1957) was a German physicist, mathematician, chemist, and Nobel Prize winner. Bothe won a Nobel Prize in Physics for 1954 (along with Max Born) for his invention of the coincidence circuit.
Biography
Early years
He was born in Oranienburg, Germany (near Berlin) and studied physics from 1908 until 1912 at the University of Berlin under Max Planck. Bothe obtaining his doctorate by 1914. During World War I he was taken prisoner by the Russians and spent 5 years in captivity in Siberia.
After the war, he collaborated with Hans Geiger at Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin, where he made his most important discoveries. He discovered that if a single particle is detected by two or more Geiger counters, the detection will be practically coincident in time. Using this observation, he constructed the coincidence circuit allowing several counters in coincidence to determine the angular momentum of a particle. Bothe's coincidence circuit was one of the first AND logic gate (1924). Bothe studied the Compton effect using such a set up and establishing the modern analysis of scatter processes.
Middle years
During the 1920s Bothe used the coincidence method to discovery penetrating radiation coming from the upper atmosphere now known as cosmic rays. His data indicated that the tradition was not composed exclusively of gamma rays, but was also composed of high energy particles (now known to be mostly mesons). | |
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