Background
Barschall was born as Heinrich Hermann Barschall in Berlin, Germany. His father was a patent attorney who had received a Doctor of Philosophy in chemistry after studying with Nobel Laureates Emil Fischer and Fritz Haber.
physicist university professor nuclear scientist
Barschall was born as Heinrich Hermann Barschall in Berlin, Germany. His father was a patent attorney who had received a Doctor of Philosophy in chemistry after studying with Nobel Laureates Emil Fischer and Fritz Haber.
He received his Doctor of Philosophy from Princeton University in 1940 under the direction of Rudolf Ladenburg. He also worked closely with John A. Wheeler.
After beginning study in several universities in Germany, he emigrated to the United States in 1937 during the early Holocaust period. Though raised as a Lutheran, he had some Jewish ancestry. After a suggestion by Niels Bohr, he carried out in only a few days with fellow graduate student Morton H. Kanner the first demonstration of fission by fast neutrons and thorium and uranium.
His thesis was on the interaction of fast neutrons with helium.
In a paper with John A. Wheeler he reported the discovery of spin-orbit coupling in neutron scattering. He worked at the University of Kansas, and then at the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico continuing his work with fast neutrons.
In 1946 he joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he remained for most of his career following a program on determining fast neutron cross-sections, directing the doctoral dissertation research of over forty students. In dismay, he stopped work in nuclear physics, and left for two years at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories where he worked on the development of intense sources of high-energy neutrons for materials testing and medical uses.
Returning to Wisconsin, with a joint appointment in the departments of Nuclear Engineering and Physics—and, later, also Medical Physics, he concentrated on the medical application of neutrons in cancer therapy until his retirement in 1986.
His doctoral students include Charles K. Bockelman.
National Academy of Sciences. American Academy of Arts and Sciences]
In 1970, his laboratory was destroyed by a terrorist attack on a military research facility there, which seriously injured one of his graduate students and killed a member of another research group.