Isidor Isaac Rabi - Europe

Europe

In May 1927, Rabi was appointed a Barnard Fellow. This came with a $1,500 ($20,069 in 2012 dollars) stipend for the period from September 1927 to June 1928. He immediately applied for a year's leave of absence from the City College of New York so he could study in Europe. When this was refused, he resigned. On reaching Zurich, where he hoped to work for Erwin Schrödinger, he met two fellow Americans, Julius Adams Stratton and Linus Pauling. They found that Schrödinger was leaving, as he had been appointed head of the Theoretical Institute at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Rabi therefore decided to seek a position with Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich instead. In Munich, he found two more Americans, Howard Percy Robertson and Edward Condon. Sommerfeld accepted Rabi as postdoctoral student. Rudolf Peierls and Hans Bethe were also working with Sommerfeld at the time, but the three Americans became especially close.

On Willis' advice, Rabi traveled to Leeds for the 97th annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where he heard Werner Heisenberg present a paper on quantum mechanics. Afterwards, Rabi moved to Copenhagen, where he volunteered to work for Niels Bohr. Bohr was on vacation, but Rabi went straight to work on calculating the magnetic susceptibility of molecular hydrogen. After Bohr returned in October, he arranged for Rabi and Yoshio Nishina to continue their work with Wolfgang Pauli at the University of Hamburg.

Although he came to Hamburg to work with Pauli, Rabi found Otto Stern working there with two English-speaking postdoctoral fellows, Ronald Fraser and John Bradshaw Taylor. Rabi soon made friends with them, and became interested in their molecular beam experiments, for which Stern would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1943. Their research involved non-uniform magnetic fields, which were difficult to manipulate and hard to measure accurately. Rabi came up with the idea of using a uniform field instead, with the molecular beam at a glancing angle, so the atoms would be deflected like light through a prism. This would be easier to use, and produce more accurate results. Encouraged by Stern, and greatly assisted by Taylor, Rabi managed to get his idea to work. On Stern's advice, Rabi wrote a letter about his results to Nature, which published it in February 1929, followed by a paper entitled Zur Methode der Ablenkung von Molekularstrahlen ("On the method of deflection of molecular beams") to Zeitschrift für Physik, where it was published in April.

By this time the Barnard Fellowship had expired and Rabi and Helen were living off a $182 per month stipend from the Rockefeller Foundation. They left Hamburg for Leipzig, where he hoped to work with Heisenberg. In Leipzig, he found Robert Oppenheimer, a fellow New Yorker. It would be the start of a long friendship. However, Heisenberg departed for a tour of the United States in March 1929, so Rabi and Oppenheimer decided to go to the ETH Zurich, where Pauli was now the professor of Physics. Rabi's education in physics was enriched by the leaders in the field he met there, which included Paul Dirac, Walter Heitler, Fritz London, Francis Wheeler Loomis, John von Neumann, John Slater, Leó Szilárd and Eugene Wigner.