From left to right, "factory" building, main building, director's villa, known today as Haber Villa. Back cover: Campus of the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, 2011. The Institute's historic buildings, contiguous with the "Röntgenbau" on their right, house the Departments of Physical Chemistry and Molecular Physics. Below the "Röntgenbau" is the building of the infrared free electron laser. The topmost building on the right houses the Department of Inorganic Chemistry. The Institute's workshops are located in the two-towered building. The hexagonal structure houses the Theory Department and the Joint Network Center. The two buildings to the left on the lower side of the areal view house the Department of Chemical Physics. The red-roofed building next to Haber Villa is Willstätter House, which houses part of the Theory Department.
We outline the institutional history and highlight aspects of the scientific history of the Fritz Haber Institute (FHI) of the Max Planck Society, successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, from its founding in 1911 until about the turn of the 21st century. Established as one of the first two Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the Institute began as a much-awaited remedy for what prominent German chemists warned was the waning of Germany's scientific and technological superiority relative to the United States and to other European nations. The history of the Institute has largely paralleled that of 20th century Germany. It spearheaded the research and development of chemical weapons during World War I, then experienced a "golden era" during the 1920s and early 1930s, in spite of financial hardships. Under the National Socialists it suffered a purge of its scientific staff and a diversion of its research into the service of the new regime, accompanied by a breakdown in its international relations. In the immediate aftermath of World War II it suffered crippling material losses, from which it recovered slowly in the postwar era. In 1952, the Institute took the name of its founding director and the following year joined the fledgling Max Planck Society, successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Institute supported diverse research into the structure of matter and electron microscopy in its geographically isolated and politically precarious location in West Berlin. In subsequent decades, as Berlin benefited from the policies of détente and later glasnost and the Max Planck Society continued to reassess its preferred model of a research institute, the FHI reorganized around a board of coequal scientific directors and renewed its focus on the investigation of elementary processes on surfaces and interfaces, topics of research that had been central to the work of Fritz Haber and the first "golden era" of the Institute. Throughout its one-hundred-year history, the Institute's pace-setting research has been shaped by dozens of distinguished scientists, among them seven Nobel laureates. Here we highlight the contributions made at the Institute to the fields of gas-phase kinetics and dynamics, early quantum physics, colloid chemistry, electron microscopy, and surface chemistry, and we give an account of the key role the Institute played in implementing the Berlin Electron Synchrotron (BESSY I and II). Current research at the Institute in surface science and catalysis as well as molecular physics and spectroscopy is exemplified in this issue [Angew. Chem. 2011, 123, 10242; Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2011, 50, 10064].
We outline the institutional history and highlight aspects of the scientific history of the Fritz Haber Institute (FHI) of the Max Planck Society, successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, from its founding in 1911 until about the turn of the 21st century. Established as one of the first two Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the Institute began as a much‐awaited remedy for what prominent German chemists warned was the waning of Germany’s scientific and technological superiority relative to the United States and to other European nations. The history of the Institute has largely paralleled that of 20th century Germany. It spearheaded the research and development of chemical weapons during World War I, then experienced a “golden era” during the 1920s and early 1930s, in spite of financial hardships. Under the National Socialists it suffered a purge of its scientific staff and a diversion of its research into the service of the new regime, accompanied by a breakdown in its international relations. In the immediate aftermath of World War II it suffered crippling material losses, from which it recovered slowly in the postwar era. In 1952, the Institute took the name of its founding director and the following year joined the fledgling Max Planck Society, successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Institute supported diverse research into the structure of matter and electron microscopy in its geographically isolated and politically precarious location in West Berlin. In subsequent decades, as Berlin benefited from the policies of détente and later glasnost and the Max Planck Society continued to reassess its preferred model of a research institute, the FHI reorganized around a board of coequal scientific directors and renewed its focus on the investigation of elementary processes on surfaces and interfaces, topics of research that had been central to the work of Fritz Haber and the first “golden era” of the Institute. Throughout its one‐hundred‐year history, the Institute’s pace‐setting research has been shaped by dozens of distinguished scientists, among them seven Nobel laureates. Here we highlight the contributions made at the Institute to the fields of gas‐phase kinetics and dynamics, early quantum physics, colloid chemistry, electron microscopy, and surface chemistry, and we give an account of the key role the Institute played in implementing the Berlin Electron Synchrotron (BESSY I and II). Current research at the Institute in surface science and catalysis as well as molecular physics and spectroscopy is exemplified in this issue [Angew. Chem. 2011, 123, 10242; Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2011, 50, 10064].
As part of an attempt to establish a new understanding of the earliest applications of quantum mechanics and their importance to the overall development of quantum theory, this paper reexamines the role of research on molecular structure in the transition from the so-called old quantum theory to quantum mechanics and in the two years immediately following this shift (1926–1928). We argue on two bases against the common tendency to marginalize the contribution of these researches. First, because these applications addressed issues of longstanding interest to physicists, which they hoped, if not expected, a complete quantum theory to address, and for which they had already developed methods under the old quantum theory that would remain valid under the new mechanics. Second, because generating these applications was one of, if not the, principal means by which physicists clarified the unity, generality, and physical meaning of quantum mechanics, thereby reworking the theory into its now commonly recognized form, as well as developing an understanding of the kinds of predictions it generated and the ways in which these differed from those of the earlier classical mechanics. More broadly, we hope with this article to provide a new viewpoint on the importance of problem solving to scientific research and theory construction, one that might complement recent work on its role in science pedagogy.
Size-controlled polymer nanodomes (PNDs) benefit a broad cross-section of existing and emerging technologies. Condensed droplet polymerization (CDP) is a vacuum-based synthesis technology that produces PNDs from monomer precursors in a single step. However, the effect of synthesis and processing conditions on the PND size distribution remains elusive. Towards size distribution control, we report the effect of substrate temperature, on which monomer droplets condense, on the size distribution of PNDs. We take a reductionist approach and operate the CDP under batch mode to match the conditions commonly used in condensation research. Notably, despite the rich knowledge base in dropwise condensation, the behavior of nonpolar liquids like a common monomer, i.e., 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA), is not well understood. We bridge that gap by demonstrating that dropwise condensation of HEMA follows a two-stage growth process. Early-stage growth is dominated by drop nucleation and growth, giving rise to relatively uniform sizes with a lognormal distribution, whereas late-stage growth is dominated by the combined effect of drop coalescence and renucleation, leading to a bimodal size distribution. This new framework for understanding the PND size distribution enables an unprecedented population of PNDs. Their controlled size distribution has the potential to enable programmable properties for emergent materials.
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