J. Hans D. Jensen - Career

Career

In 1937 Jensen was Privatdozent (unpaid lecturer) at the University of Hamburg and began working with Paul Harteck, director of the university's physical chemistry department and advisor to the Heereswaffenamt (HWA, Army Ordnance Office) on explosives. Harteck and his teaching assistant Wilhelm Groth made contact with the Reichskriegsministerium (RKM, Reich Ministry of War) on 24 April 1939 to tell them of potential military applications of nuclear chain reactions. Military control of the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranverein (Uranium Club), began on 1 September 1939, the day that Nazi Germany initiated WWII by invading Poland. Harteck, one of the principals in the Uranverein, brought Jensen into the project. Jensen’s main thrust was on double centrifuges for separation of uranium isotopes (see the section below citing internal reports of the Uranverein). Harteck and Jensen developed a double centrifuge based on a rocking process (Schaukelverfahren) to facilitate the separation effect.

In 1941 Jensen was named extraordinarius professor of theoretical physics at the Technische Hochschule Hannover (today, the University of Hanover), and in 1946 he became an ordinarius professor there. In 1949 he was appointed ordinarius professor at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg; since 1969 he was emeritus praecox. He was a guest professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1950), the Institute for Advanced Study (1952), and Indiana University and the California Institute of Technology (1953).

In 1963 Jensen shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics with Maria Göppert-Mayer for their proposal of the nuclear shell model; the remaining half of the prize was awarded to Eugene Wigner for unrelated work in nuclear and particle physics, especially through the application of fundamental symmetry principles.