Alison asks Rolf for the first name and radio callsign of his colleague from the previous message “Schmelzer Helps Me”.
Morse reads: CHRISTOPH D4BIU
Amazing, so we have Christoph Schmelzer, callsign D4BIU.
‘Technicians’ is a very apt label for our communicators as we have many highly intelligent, technically accomplished individuals working with the portal.
Christoph Schmelzer was active in amateur radio under the callsigns DE0078 and D4BIU. He was also a German atomic physicist, science manager and university professor.
Christoph Schmelzer was taught by private tutors at a young age before he attended the secondary school in nearby Zwickau and passed his Abitur there in 1928. He began studying chemistry at the Munich Technical University and in 1929 the Corps Bavaria Munich recipiert . When Inactive he moved after only two years at the University of Jena to physics to study. With a doctoral thesis at Max Wien , he was awarded Dr. phil. PhD . The topic was the dielectric behavior of electrolytes . He continued these investigations during a research stay from 1936 to 1939 at Brown University in Providence , Rhode Island , USA, returned to Jena in 1939 and dealt with the physics and technology of decimeter waves until the end of World War II . He did not have to do military service. In 1945, however, he and his family were brought to Heidenheim an der Brenz by the Allies and interned there . Schmelzer was able to evaluate his research carried out in Jena and partially publish the results.
1948 called him Walther Bothe as an assistant at the Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg , he at himself in 1949 with a thesis on the dielectric behavior polar constructed matter habilitated . At the beginning of the 1950s he concentrated on particle accelerators and developed the idea of a universal heavy ion accelerator . Proven by his investigations into accelerator physics , he was accepted in 1952 by the newly emerging research center CERN in Geneva in their study group for a 30 GeV proton synchrotron in the accelerator group that was just being developed. Moving from Heidelberg to CERN since 1954, was John Adams’ deputy . Schmelzer was responsible for the high-frequency systems and played a key role in the development of the control system for the Proton Synchrotron , which went into operation in 1959.
In the same year, Schmelzer was appointed to the chair of applied physics by the University of Heidelberg . There he devoted himself to laser spectroscopy and above all to accelerator technology . Among other things, through his work, at the initiative of Hessian universities, the Federal Government and the State of Hesse founded the Society for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt for the construction (completed in 1976) and operation of the linear accelerator UNILAC , with Christoph Schmelzer as the first scientific and technical managing director. From 1971 to 1978 he was its scientific and technical director.
When he ended his management function at GSI in 1978, the number of employees had grown to around 450, with roughly the same number of external scientists from Germany and abroad still using the facility for their research work. With the linear accelerator project, which he pursued with determination, and for the implementation of which he also devised technical solutions, Schmelzer laid a central foundation stone for the development of nuclear physics research in Germany. A high-frequency linear accelerator with beams of high luminosity and precise adjustment of the beam energy over a range of orders of magnitude was absolutely new at that time but was of great importance in terms of long-term use for research, and in particular for the generation of artificial super-heavy elements. The UNILAC was designed so flexibly that it could be used as a pre-accelerator from 1985 when the GSI was expanded with a synchrotron / storage ring system ( SIS18 / ESR ). With the GSI’s linear accelerator, six new super-heavy elements (107-112) were later detected and new ways of treating tumors were found. The international future project FAIR should continue this line. Here, too, the UNILAC will be used as a pre-accelerator.
He was buried in his hometown of Lichtentanne in 2001.
Eric
