Hartmut Kallmann


Harmut Kallmann was a German physicist. He is known for his work on the scintillation counter for the detection of gamma rays.

Biography

Kallmann was born in Berlin in a Jewish family. He studied at the University of Göttingen and wrote his dissertation under Max Planck, completing it in 1920. After this he worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. As a post-doctoral researcher he worked with Fritz Haber and Fritz London. In 1933 he was dismissed from the institute due to his non-Aryan Jewish descent. The companies IG Farben and AEG provided him a research lab to continue his work with some restrictions.
He survived thanks to his wife, who was not Jewish and from a good family. His children were not considered as Jewish by the Nazi authorities.
Kallmann built the world's first organic scintillator in Berlin.
Thermo Electron corporation credited Kallmann and Broser with pioneering modern day scintillation counting by combining a scintillating material with a photomultiplier, as a means of improving light detection and reducing the eye fatigue apparently common to earlier, cruder methods of detection.
In 1948, Kallmann's knowledge about photomultiplier scintillation counters brought him to the United States as a research fellow for the U.S. Army Signal Corps Laboratory in Belmar, New Jersey.
The book, Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s describes Kallmann's contribution to particle physics.
In 1948 he emigrated to the US and established a research lab at New York University. He died in Munich at the age of 82.

Patents and publications