11 Facts About Fritz London

Fritz Wolfgang London was a German born physicist and professor at Duke University.

Fritz London was born in Breslau, Germany as the son of Franz Fritz London.

Fritz London took visiting positions in England and France, and emigrated to the United States in 1939, of which he became a naturalized citizen in 1945.

Later in his life, Fritz London was a professor at Duke University.

Fritz London died from a heart ailment in Durham, North Carolina, in 1954.

Fritz London coined the expression "dispersion effect" for the attraction between two rare gas atoms at large distance from each other.

Eisenschitz and Fritz London showed that this repulsion is a consequence of enforcing the electronic wavefunction to be antisymmetric under electron permutations.

Fritz London was one of the early authors to have properly understood the principle of local gauge invariance in the context of the then new quantum mechanics.

Fritz London predicted the effect of flux quantization in superconductors and with his brother Heinz postulated that the electrodynamics of superconductors is described by a massive field.

Fritz London developed a theory of a rotational response of a superconductor, pointing out that rotation of a superconductor generates magnetic field Fritz London moment.

In December 1972, John Bardeen, two-time winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, established an endowment fund "to perpetuate the memory of Fritz London, distinguished scientist and member of the Duke faculty from 1939 to the time of his death in 1954, and to promote research and understanding of Physics at Duke University and in the wider scientific community".