Willis Lamb
American physicist (1913–2008)
Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. (July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who was able to precisely determine a surprising shift in electron energies in a hydrogen atom, known as the Lamb shift. For this work, Lamb shared the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics with Polykarp Kusch. He was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences.
Education and career
Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. was born on July 12, 1913 in Los Angeles, California, the son of Willis Eugene Lamb Sr., a telephone engineer, and Marie Helen Metcalf. First admitted in 1930, he obtained a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1934. For theoretical work on scattering of neutrons by a crystal, guided by J. Robert Oppenheimer, Lamb received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1938. Because of limited computational methods available at the time, this research narrowly missed revealing the Mössbauer Effect, 19 years before its recognition by Rudolf Mössbauer. He worked on nuclear theory, laser physics, and verifying quantum mechanics.
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This entry incorporates text from “Willis Lamb” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.