On the recombination of electrons and protons. Offprint from Gerlach's library
Publisher Information: 1933.
Fermi, Enrico (1901-54) and George Uhlenbeck (1900-1988). On the recombination of electrons and positrons. Offprint from Physical Review 44 (1933). 2pp. 268 x 201 mm. Single sheet, unbound. Some marginal fraying especially at right, some soiling, horizontal crease, a few small marginal tears. Good copy. From the library of physicist Walther Gerlach (1889-1979), with his initials in pencil on the first page, Fermi’s and Uhlenbeck’s names in Gerlach’s hand on the first page. Docketed.
First Edition, Rare Offprint Issue. “The discovery of the positron [by Carl Anderson in 1932] and above all the processes of creating and destructing pairs of electrons and positrons, raised great interest around the world. Fermi too tackled the subject from the theoretical point of view. In a study with Uhlenbeck, carried out during his stay in August 1933 at the University of Michigan, he worked on the process of annihilation of an electron and a positron. In particular he tried to confirm whether a certain spectral line, identified by Louis H. Gray and Gerald T. P. Tarrant in the ‘scattering of hard rays’, could be attributed, as Blackett and Occhialini had suggested, to an annihilation process but he found that, on the basis of Dirac’s theory, it did not seem possible” (F. Guerra and N. Robotti, The Lost Notebook of Enrico Fermi, p. 75).
Fermi and Uhlenbeck’s paper was published in both English and Italian; the English version is the one included in Fermi’s Collected Papers. This copy is from the library of Walther Gerlach, co-discoverer of the Stern-Gerlach effect (spin quantization in a magnetic field). Fermi, Collected Papers, no. 77b.
Book Id: 46143Price: $3,750.00