1. Rudolf Peierls was responsible for the recruitment of his compatriot Klaus Fuchs to work on Tube Alloys, as the British nuclear weapons project was called, which resulted in Peierls falling under suspicion when Fuchs was exposed as a spy for the Soviet Union in 1950.
Rudolf Peierls received many awards, including a knighthood in 1968, and wrote several books including Quantum Theory of Solids, The Laws of Nature, Surprises in Theoretical Physics, More Surprises in Theoretical Physics and an autobiography, Bird of Passage.
Rudolf Ernst Peierls was born in the Berlin suburb of Oberschoneweide, the youngest of three children of Heinrich Peierls an electrical engineer, from a family of Jewish merchants.
Rudolf Peierls's father was the managing director of a cable factory of Allgemeine Elektricitats-Gesellschaft, and his mother was his father's first wife, Elisabeth.
Rudolf Peierls had an older brother, Alfred, and an older sister, Annie.
Rudolf Peierls's mother died from Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1921, and his father married Else Hermann, the sister-in-law of the playwright Ludwig Fulda.
Rudolf Peierls commenced school a year late because he needed glasses, and his parents did not trust him not to lose them or break them.
Rudolf Peierls wanted to study engineering, but his parents, who doubted his practical abilities, suggested physics instead.
Rudolf Peierls entered the University of Berlin, where he listened to lectures by Max Planck, Walther Bothe and Walther Nernst.
In 1926 Rudolf Peierls decided to transfer to the University of Munich to study under Arnold Sommerfeld, who was considered to be the greatest teacher of theoretical physics.
On his advice, Rudolf Peierls moved to the University of Leipzig, where Heisenberg had been appointed to a chair in 1927.
Rudolf Peierls was unable to develop the theory, but work on Hall effect was more productive.
Rudolf Peierls was able to do so, resulting in his first published paper.
Heisenberg left in 1929 to lecture in America, China, Japan and India, and on his recommendation Rudolf Peierls moved on to ETH Zurich, where he studied under Wolfgang Pauli.
Rudolf Peierls submitted this work as his DPhil thesis, Zur kinetischen Theorie der Warmeleitung in Kristallen, which was accepted by the University of Leipzig in 1929.
Rudolf Peierls's theory made specific predictions of the behaviour of metals at very low temperatures, but another twenty years would pass before the techniques were developed to confirm them experimentally.
Rudolf Peierls accepted an offer from Pauli to become his assistant in place of Felix Bloch.
In 1930, Rudolf Peierls travelled to the Netherlands to meet Hans Kramers, and to Copenhagen to meet Niels Bohr.
Rudolf Peierls was a pioneer of the concept of "holes" in semiconductors.
Rudolf Peierls established "zones" before Leon Brillouin, despite Brillouin's name being currently attached to the idea, and applied it to phonons.
Rudolf Peierls submitted a paper on the subject for his habilitation, acquiring the right to teach at German universities.
In 1932, Peierls was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to study abroad, which he used to study in Rome under Enrico Fermi, and then at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England under Ralph H Fowler.
In Rome, Rudolf Peierls completed two papers on electronic band structure, in which he introduced the Rudolf Peierls substitution, and derived a general expression for diamagnetism in metals at low temperatures.
Rudolf Peierls declined an offer from Otto Stern of a position at the University of Hamburg.
Rudolf Peierls collaborated with Bethe on photodisintegration and the statistical mechanics of alloys when challenged by James Chadwick.
Rudolf Peierls's students included Fred Hoyle and P L Kapur, a student from India.
Rudolf Peierls was naturalised as a British subject on 27 March 1940.
Rudolf Peierls was eager to participate in the fight against fascism and militarism, but the only organisation that would accept him was the Auxiliary Fire Service.
Rudolf Peierls accepted an offer from the University of Toronto to send his two children to live with a family in Canada.
When Oliphant made the services of his secretary available for typing up the Peierl's and Frisch's papers for the MAUD Committee in September 1940, they were not allowed to enter the Nuffield Building where she worked, so Rudolf Peierls submitted them for typing by dictaphone on wax cylinders.
Frisch and Rudolf Peierls thought at first that uranium enrichment was best achieved through thermal diffusion, but as the difficulties with this approach became more apparent they switched to gaseous diffusion, bringing in a fellow refugee from Germany, Franz Simon, as an expert on the subject.
Rudolf Peierls recruited yet another refugee from Germany, Klaus Fuchs, as his assistant in May 1941.
Later that year, Peierls flew to the United States, where he visited Urey and Fermi in New York, Arthur H Compton in Chicago, Robert Oppenheimer in Berkeley, and Jesse Beams in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Simon and Rudolf Peierls were attached to the Kellex Corporation, which was engaged in the K-25 Project, designing and building the American gaseous diffusion plant.
Rudolf Peierls moved on to the Los Alamos Laboratory in February 1944; Skyrme followed in July, and Fuchs in August.
Oppenheimer then wrote to the director of the Manhattan Project, Brigadier General Leslie R Groves, Jr, requesting that Peierls be sent to take Teller's place in T Division.
Rudolf Peierls arrived from New York on 8 February 1944, and subsequently succeeded Chadwick as head of the British Mission at Los Alamos.
Rudolf Peierls became leader of T-1 Group, and so was responsible for the design of the explosive lenses used in the implosion-type nuclear weapon to focus an explosion onto a spherical shape.
Rudolf Peierls sent regular reports to Chadwick, the head of the British Mission to the Manhattan Project, in Washington, DC.
When Groves found out, he asked Rudolf Peierls to send him reports too.
Rudolf Peierls was one of those present at the Trinity nuclear test on 16 July 1945.
Rudolf Peierls was responsible for the recruitment of Fuchs to the British project, an action which was to result in Rudolf Peierls falling under suspicion when Fuchs was exposed as a Soviet spy in 1950.
In 1999, The Spectator garnered outrage from Rudolf Peierls's family when it published an article by journalist Nicholas Farrell that alleged that Rudolf Peierls was a spy for the Soviet Union.
Rudolf Peierls had a Russian wife, as did his brother, and he maintained close contact with colleagues in the Soviet Union before and after the Second World War.
Rudolf Peierls was denied a visa to visit the United States to attend a Nuclear Physics Conference in Chicago in 1951.
Physicists were in demand after the war, and Rudolf Peierls received offers from several universities.
Rudolf Peierls seriously considered an offer of a position at Cambridge from William Lawrence Bragg, but decided to return to Birmingham.
Rudolf Peierls worked on nuclear forces, scattering, quantum field theories, collective motion in nuclei, transport theory, and statistical mechanics.
Rudolf Peierls had largely left solid state physics behind when, in 1953, he began collecting his lecture notes on the subject into a book.
Rudolf Peierls built up the physics department at Birmingham by attracting high quality researchers.
Rudolf Peierls delivered the lectures on quantum mechanics, a subject that had not been taught at Birmingham before the war.
In 1946 Rudolf Peierls became a consultant to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell.
Rudolf Peierls resigned from Harwell in 1957 due to what he saw as a lack of openness in security vetting at the request of the Americans, which he felt indicated a lack of trust in him on the part of senior staff; but he was invited to rejoin in 1960, and did so in 1963, remaining as a consultant for another 30 years.
Rudolf Peierls became the Wykeham Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford in 1963.
Rudolf Peierls wrote several books including Quantum Theory of Solids, The Laws of Nature, Surprises in Theoretical Physics, More Surprises in Theoretical Physics and an autobiography, Bird of Passage.
Rudolf Peierls liked to read scientific papers in enlarged script on a computer screen.
Rudolf Peierls was awarded the Rutherford Memorial Medal in 1952, the Royal Medal in 1959, the Lorentz Medal in 1962, the Max Planck Medal in 1963, the Guthrie Medal and Prize in 1968, the Matteucci Medal in 1982, and the Enrico Fermi Award from the United States Government for exceptional contribution to the science of atomic energy in 1980.