Otto Ernst Heinrich Klemperer

For the conductor, see Otto Klemperer.

Maria Wilhelmine Klemperer with her son Otto, 1901, painted by Sophie Koner

Otto Ernst Heinrich Klemperer (1899–1987^[1]) was a physicist expert in electron optics. He was granted his doctorate by the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 1923.^[2] His thesis advisor was Hans Geiger.^[2] He continued to work with Geiger in the 1930s.^[3]

Klemperer was co-inventor in 1928 of the Geiger-Klemperer ball counter,^[4] "the first major advance in the design of proportional counters".^[5] During the 1930s, he worked at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge on discrepancies between Fermi's theory of β-decay and the observed radiation properties of rubidium and polonium.^[3] He was later an assistant professor and Reader in Physics at Imperial College, London,^[6] where he wrote the third edition of his book on electron optics with Mike Barnett.^[7]

The conductor Otto Klemperer was his father's cousin.^[8] His uncle was the Romanist Victor Klemperer.

Bibliography

• Klemperer, Otto; Barnett, M.E. (1971). Electron optics. Cambridge monographs on physics (3 ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-17973-7.
• Klemperer, Otto (1972). Electron physics: the physics of the free electron. Butterworths.

References

1. Klemperer, Victor (2002). Deníky 1933-1941: Chci vydat svědectví. Litomyšl. p. 528. ISBN 978-80-7185-492-0.
2. Otto Ernst Heinrich Klemperer at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
3. Klemperer, O. (1935). "On the Radioactivity of Potassium and Rubidium". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences. 148 (865): 638–648. Bibcode:1935RSPSA.148..638K. doi:10.1098/rspa.1935.0038. JSTOR 96293.
4. Frame, PW (2005). "A history of radiation detection instrumentation". Health Physics. 88 (6): 613–37. doi:10.1097/00004032-200506000-00008. PMID 15891457.
5. Ryan, Michael T.; Poston, Sr., John W. (2006). A Half Century of Health Physics: 50th Anniversary of the Health Physics Society. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. p. 106. ISBN 0-7817-6934-5.
6. Chambers, William (1973). Chambers's encyclopaedia. Vol. 5. International Learning Systems. p. xiii.
7. Smith, K. C. A.; B. C. Breton. "Sir Charles Oatley and the Scanning Electron Microscope: II. Research directed by W. C. Nixon". Advances in Imaging and Electron Physics. Elsevier. Retrieved 16 January 2011.
8. Gay, Hannah (2007). "Imperial College during the Second World War". The history of Imperial College London, 1907-2007: higher education and research in science, technology and medicine. World Scientific. p. 261. ISBN 978-1-86094-709-4.