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GOEPPERT-MAYER, Maria (1906-72). Über Elementarakte mit zwei Quantensprüngen. Offprint from: Annalen der Physik 5, Folge Band 9. Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1931.
8o. Unbound. Provenance: Theodore von Kármán (1881-1963) (with signature in pencil and library markings on first leaf).
FIRST EDITION, offprint issue. The doctoral thesis of Maria Goeppert-Mayer, the mathematical physicist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize for physics with Hans Jensen for their discoveries regarding the shell structure of nuclear particles. Goeppert-Mayer studied physics under Max Born at Göttingen, where she became proficient in quantum mechanics; she developed a close friendship with Born, who described her as one of his best students. Her dissertation, which she submitted in 1930, "was an extension of Dirac's theory of radiation and matter to the case of two-photon processes, which required calculating the second-order time-dependent perturbation in addition to the first. Goeppert recognized that double-photon emission and absorption are analogous to the Raman effect; the dispersion formula of Kramers and Heisenberg could be applied to this process, but with only qualitative results. . . . Since the Raman effect can be analyzed as a case of dispersion, Goeppert used Dirac's theory for dispersion to calculate the transition probabilities. Using a suggestion made by Tatiana Ehrenfest, she added a term to the Lagrangian that is a total differential with respect to time, and derived a Hamiltonian in which the second-order term is much smaller than the first. That made the second-order perturbation a feasible calculation" (DSB). With the development of high-intensity lasers in the 1960s, Mayer's predictions regarding double-photon decay were able to be verified experimentally; "this led to the development in the 1970s of the double-photon absorption technique in laser spectroscopy as a means of eliminating the Doppler broadening of an absorption line" (DSB).
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FIRST EDITION, offprint issue. The doctoral thesis of Maria Goeppert-Mayer, the mathematical physicist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize for physics with Hans Jensen for their discoveries regarding the shell structure of nuclear particles. Goeppert-Mayer studied physics under Max Born at Göttingen, where she became proficient in quantum mechanics; she developed a close friendship with Born, who described her as one of his best students. Her dissertation, which she submitted in 1930, "was an extension of Dirac's theory of radiation and matter to the case of two-photon processes, which required calculating the second-order time-dependent perturbation in addition to the first. Goeppert recognized that double-photon emission and absorption are analogous to the Raman effect; the dispersion formula of Kramers and Heisenberg could be applied to this process, but with only qualitative results. . . . Since the Raman effect can be analyzed as a case of dispersion, Goeppert used Dirac's theory for dispersion to calculate the transition probabilities. Using a suggestion made by Tatiana Ehrenfest, she added a term to the Lagrangian that is a total differential with respect to time, and derived a Hamiltonian in which the second-order term is much smaller than the first. That made the second-order perturbation a feasible calculation" (DSB). With the development of high-intensity lasers in the 1960s, Mayer's predictions regarding double-photon decay were able to be verified experimentally; "this led to the development in the 1970s of the double-photon absorption technique in laser spectroscopy as a means of eliminating the Doppler broadening of an absorption line" (DSB).