Career
Primakoff contributed to the understanding of weak interactions, double beta decay, spin waves in ferromagnetism, and the interaction between neutrinos and the atomic nucleus. In his honor is named the Holstein-Primakoff transformation which is designed to treat spin waves as bosonic excitations. In 1940 he worked at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, subsequently at the Queens College.
Primakoff was the first Donner Professor of Physics in the University of Pennsylvania.
In 2011 the American Physical Society established the Henry Primakoff Award for Early-Career Particle Physics.