Hans Georg Dehmelt

Dehmelt has married twice in his life. The first was to Irmgard Lassow who unfortunately died. He then married Diana Dundore. He has a son, Gerd from his first marriage to Lassow.

Hans Georg Dehmelt was born on September 9, 1922 in Gorlitz, Germany. His father, Georg Dehmelt was a law graduate who made his living in real estate.

Young Dehmelt’s growing up years was marred by social upheaval. The world was reeling under the pain of World War I and political instability. Nevertheless, he did not let this mar his academic interest. At the age of ten, he gained scholarship at the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster.

Since early, he developed immense interest in physics. He supplemented his school curriculum with self-education. He voraciously read books on radio that deepened his interest in physics. He soon briefed himself with important physics principles. Dehmelt graduated from the Gymnasium in 1940.

Following his graduation, he volunteered for service in the German Army in 1940 as a gun crew. He rose to the rank of senior private. Luckily, in 1943, Dehmelt was ordered back to Germany to study physics under an army program at the University of Breslau. After a year of study, he returned to army service but was captured during the Battle of the Bulge.

Released from an American prisoner of war camp in 1946, Dehmelt returned to study physics at the University of Göttingen, where he supported himself by repairing and bartering old, pre-war radio sets.

Dehmelt’s PhD work on Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance earned him an invitation to join Walter Gordy's well-known microwave laboratory at Duke University as postdoctoral associate. Therein, he befriended James Frank, Fritz London, Lothar Nordheim and Hertha Sponer.

Dehmelt earned himself a visiting assistant professorship appointment at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washingtonin 1955. His work involved advising Edwin Uehling's students during the latter’s sabbatical and doing independent research. No sooner than in 1958, he was made associate professor and by 1961, gained full professorship.

In 1955, Dehmelt built his first electron impact tube in George Volkoffs laboratory. The following year, based on his study and learning from seminars at Gottingen, he carried out the experiment Paramagnetic Resonance Reorientation of Atoms and Ions Aligned by Electron Impact. For the first time, Dehmelt indicated usefulness of ion trapping for high resolution spectroscopy.

In 1956, Dehmelt efficiently produced and monitored a polarized atom cloud through his paper, Slow Spin Relaxation of Optically Polarized Sodium Atoms. The ion trapping for high resolution spectroscopy gave Dehmelt the idea for his 1958 experiment Spin Resonance of Free Electrons Polarized by Exchange Collisions.

Before Dehmelt was to conduct his 1958 Spin Resonance experiment, it was necessary for him to learn how to produce polarized atoms which could transfer their orientation to trapped electrons. By trapping the electrons in a neutralizing ion cloud slowly diffusing in the buffer gas, he was able to carry out the experiment.

Dehmelt’s most outstanding career achievement has been the development of the ion trapping method. In the decade of 1950s, he successfully developed a method to capture charged atoms or ions in a trap using magnetic field. Dehmelt then went further by using the device for electron isolation in 1973. The electron isolation opened the gateway for the precise measurement of key properties of electrons.