Biography of FELIX BLOCH

BIOGRAPHY OF FELIX BLOCH ( 1905 - 1983 )

Felix Bloch (October 23, 1905 – September 10, 1983) was a Swiss-born physicist, working mainly in the USA.

Born in Zurich, Switzerland. He was educated there and at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, also in Zurich. Initially studying engineering he soon changed to physics. Graduating in 1927 he continued his physics studies at the University of Leipzig, gaining his doctorate in 1928. He remained in German academia, studying with Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi. In 1933 he left Germany, emigrating to work at Stanford University in 1934. In 1939, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

One of the founders of the physics of magnetism and modern solid state physics Bloch introduced many important notions: Bloch wave functions, Bloch walls, etc. In physics, magnetism is one of the phenomena by which materials exert an attractive or repulsive force on other materials. Some well known materials that exhibit easily detectable magnetic properties are iron, some steels, and the mineral lodestone; however, all materials are influenced to greater or lesser degree by the presence of a magnetic field.
Weiss domains are small areas in a crystal structure of a ferromagnetic material with uniformly oriented magnetic momenta. They were named after the french physicist Pierre-Ernest Weiss (1865–1940).
Weiss discovered in 1907 that the magnetic moment of atoms ("elementary magnets") of ferromagnetic materials become oriented, even without an external magnetic field. The size of these oriented domains is in the range of 10^-3 to 10^-5 mm including a volume of about 10⁶ to 10⁹ atoms. The orientation is related to the crystal structure of the material.

By nature the Weiss domains are magnetized to the full saturation. The boundaries between the domains are called Bloch walls.

During WW II Felix Bloch worked on atomic energy at Los Alamos National Laboratory, before resigning to join the radar project at Harvard University. Post-war he concentrated on investigations into nuclear induction and nuclear magnetic resonance, which are the underlying principles of MRI. He and Edward Mills Purcell were awarded the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics for "their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements." In 1954–1955, he served for one unsatisfactory year as the first Director-General of CERN. In 1961, he was made Max Stein Professor of Physics at Stanford University.

There are a few places where the biography of FELIX BLOCH can be found.

Wikipedia electronic Encyclopedia(http://en.wikipedia.org/) , an article FELIX BLOCH.

Biographies of the Nobel Prise winners at Nobel Prise ArXiv.

STANFORD Database of eminent scientists.

Magnetic states

diamagnetism – superdiamagnetism – paramagnetism – superparamagnetism – ferromagnetism – antiferromagnetism – ferrimagnetism – metamagnetism – spin glass