This article is about the German physicist. For the Austrian-Swiss physicist who received the Nobel Prize in 1945, see Wolfgang Pauli. For the German footballer, see Wolfgang Paul (footballer).
He humorously referred to Wolfgang Pauli as his "imaginary part".[1]
Wolfgang Paul (German pronunciation:[ˈvɔlfɡaŋˈpaʊ̯l]ⓘ; 10 August 1913 – 7 December 1993) was a German physicist, who co-developed the non-magnetic quadrupole mass filter which laid the foundation for what is now called an ion trap.[2] He shared one-half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 for this work with Hans Georg Dehmelt; the other half of the Prize in that year was awarded to Norman Foster Ramsey, Jr.
He developed techniques for trapping charged particles in mass spectrometry by electric quadrupole fields in the 1950s.[3]Paul traps are used extensively today to contain and study ions. He developed molecular beam lenses and worked on a 500 MeV electron synchrotron, followed by one at 2500 MeV in 1965. Later he worked on containing slow neutrons in magnetic storage rings, measuring the free neutron lifetime.
In 1957, Paul was a signatory of the Göttingen Manifesto, a declaration of 18 leading nuclear scientists of West Germany against arming the West German army with tactical nuclear weapons.