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Department of Physics525 Northwestern Avenue
West Lafayette, IN
47907-2036
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(765) 494-2970
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Al Wattenburg - General Colloquium
September 12, 2002
"Birth Centennial of Enrico Fermi. Wave-Particle Duality of Neutrons"
Al Wattenburg, Fermilab, Professor Emeritus
Sept. 29, 2001 was the hundredth anniversary of Fermi's birth. Fermi was a brilliant theorist, excellent experimentalist, and a fabulous teacher. I hope to give you some understanding of what made him such a unique person. However, the latter half of the talk is going to be devoted to contributions of Fermi that are not well known. In 1946 he and his associates published a series of articles in the Physical Review. The nuclear reactors developed during the war provided intense beams of neutrons that made possible optical and scattering experiments that were sources of new information to physicists, chemists and biologists. These were terrific tools for studying condensed matter systems, molecular systems, and nuclei. In these experiments neutrons act as as both waves and particles in the same experiment. Fourteen years after these papers, there were forty research reactors around the world devoted almost exclusively to making use of the techniques and theory revealed in these papers.