James Franck

German-born American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1925 with Gustav Hertz for research on the excitation and ionization of atoms by electron bombardment that verified the quantized nature of energy transfer.

Franck studied at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin, received his doctorate from the latter in 1906, and served in the German army during World War I. He and Hertz performed their prizewinning work at the University of Berlin in 1912–14. They bombarded mercury atoms with electrons and traced the energy changes that resulted from the collisions. They found that electrons with insufficient velocity simply bounced off the mercury atoms, but that an electron with a higher velocity lost precisely 4.9 electronvolts of energy to an atom. If the electron had more than 4.9 volts of energy, the mercury atom still absorbed only that amount. The Franck-Hertz experiment gave proof of Niels Bohr’s theory that an atom can absorb internal energy only in precise and definite amounts, or quanta.

Franck was appointed professor of physics at the University of Göttingen in 1920. In protest against Nazi policies he resigned his post and went to Denmark (1933). Arriving in the United States in 1935, Franck was appointed professor at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and in 1938 became professor of physical chemistry at the University of Chicago.

Franck’s researches in the fields of photochemistry and atomic physics included determinations from molecular band spectra of the energy involved in the dissociation of molecules. During World War II he worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Franck became a leader of those scientists in the Manhattan Project who sought to stop the bomb’s use against Japan; they instead suggested that the bomb be exploded in an unpopulated area to demonstrate its power to the Japanese government.

Franck died of a heart attack at the age of 81 on 21 May 1964.