Walter Franz (8 April 1911, in
Munich
Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...
– 16 February 1992, in
Münster
Münster (; ) is an independent city#Germany, independent city (''Kreisfreie Stadt'') in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is in the northern part of the state and is considered to be the cultural centre of the Westphalia region. It is also a ...
) was a German theoretical
physicist
A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...
who independently discovered the
Franz–Keldysh effect.
Franz was a student of
Arnold Sommerfeld
Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld (; 5 December 1868 – 26 April 1951) was a German Theoretical physics, theoretical physicist who pioneered developments in Atomic physics, atomic and Quantum mechanics, quantum physics, and also educated and ...
at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (
LMU) in Munich, Germany. There he was granted the doctoral degree Dr.phil. in 1934. The (German) title of his dissertation was
''Comptoneffekt'' ''am gebundenen Elektron''. In the preface to the book ''Optik'', Sommerfeld cited him for "the most recent and particularly lucid treatment" of the vectorial generalization of
Huygens’ principle.
[Arnold Sommerfeld, translated from the first German edition by Otto Laporte and Peter A. Moldauer '' Optics - Lectures on Theoretical Physics Volume IV'' (Academic Press, 1964), p. vi]
With
Adolf Kratzer, another student of Sommerfeld, Franz co-authored the book
''Transzendente Funktionen''. The article in which Franz independently published the Franz–Keldysh effect was published in 1958.
Selected bibliography
* Adolf Kratzer and Walter Franz, ''Transzendente Funktionen'' (Akadem. Verl.-Ges. Geest & Portig, 1960)
* W. Franz, ''Die Streuung von Strahlung am magnetischen Elektron'', ''Annalen der Physik'' 425, Issue 8, 689-707 (1938)
* Walter Franz, ''Einfluß eines elektrischen Feldes auf eine optische Absorptionskante'', ''Z. Naturforschung'' 13a, 484-489 (1958)
Notes
{{DEFAULTSORT:Franz, Walter
20th-century German physicists
1911 births
1992 deaths
Academic staff of the University of Münster