18 Facts About Ralph Kronig

Ralph Kronig is noted for the discovery of particle spin and for his theory of X-ray absorption spectroscopy.

Ralph Kronig was born on 10 March 1904 to German parents in Dresden, Germany.

Ralph Kronig died in Zeist on 16 November 1995 at the age of 91.

Early in Kronig's career he had encountered Paul Ehrenfest who, while visiting America in 1924, had advised the young physicist Ralph Kronig to revisit Europe.

Ralph Kronig left for that continent later in 1924 and paid visits to the important centers for theoretical-physics research in Germany and Copenhagen.

Ralph Kronig was privileged to be a young, brilliant physicist in that glory-day of 20th century theoretical physics, which made it possible for him to live and work among the great physicists of that era like Ehrenfest, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Kramers.

In January 1925, when Ralph Kronig was still a Columbia University PhD student, he first proposed electron spin after hearing Pauli in Tubingen.

Now Ralph Kronig was proposing to set the electron rotating in space.

Ralph Kronig had come up with the idea of electron spin several months before George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit.

Ralph Kronig did not hold a grudge against Pauli for this turn of events.

Together with Isidor Isaac Rabi, Ralph Kronig gave the first solution of the Schrodinger equation for the rigid symmetric top.

In 1927, Ralph Kronig returned to Europe for good and worked in different prominent centres of research: Copenhagen, London, Zurich.

Ralph Kronig was recognized internationally by then as a renowned theorist who corresponded with the leading characters of that time and made interesting contributions to quantum mechanics and the application of it particularly on the physics of molecules and molecular spectra, an area on which he was the expert of those days.

Ralph Kronig was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1946, in 1969 he became a foreign member.

Ralph Kronig, published the first theory of x-ray absorption fine structure, which contained some of the basic concepts of the modern interpretation.

The Ralph Kronig-Penney model is a one-dimensional model of a crystal that shows how the electrons in a crystal are dispersed into allowed and forbidden bands by scattering from the extended linear array of atoms.

Ralph Kronig's theory was successful in predicting many generally observed features of the fine structure, including similar structure from similar lattices, inverse r dependence, correct r versus T dependence and increasing energy separation of the fine structure features with energy from the edge.

The short range order data of Hanawalt stimulated Ralph Kronig to develop a theory for molecules.