Herwig Schopper

Schopper was born in Lanškroun, Czechoslovakia, on 28 February 1924, to a family of Austrian descent; his father was a teacher. He grew up in a German-speaking town in the newly founded Czechoslovakia. A few years after Schopper's birth, his parents amicably divorced, and he lived with his mother during the week and with his father on weekends. His parents and relatives encouraged his scientific and musical interests.

Schopper was advanced one year early into secondary school and took his final exams in 1942, after being taught alone in his last year because his classmates had left school early with an emergency diploma. In 1938, following the annexation of the Sudetenland as a result of the Munich Agreement, Schopper had become a German citizen. After completing school, he was conscripted into the Reich Labour Service and then drafted into the Wehrmacht, where he was assigned to the Luftwaffe's intelligence service. He chose a career as an officer, which meant alternating between training and combat service (twice on the Eastern Front, then in the West during the Ardennes Offensive). At the end of the war, Schopper was taken prisoner by the British in Schleswig-Holstein.

Honorary academic degrees

Schopper received honorary doctoral degrees from: University of Erlangen (1982), Moscow State University (1988), University of Geneva (1989), University of London, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna) (1999), Institute for High Energy Physics (Protvino), The Cyprus Institute (Nicosia) (2018) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) (2024).

Life and career

In the autumn of 1945, he began studying physics at the University of Hamburg. It was here where he obtained his diploma in physics (1949) and his doctorate (1951), studying under Wilhelm Lenz and Rudolf Fleischmann. In 1950/51 he was a research assistant with Lise Meitner at Stockholm and in 1956/57 at the Cavendish Laboratory under Otto Robert Frisch.

During these fellowships, Schopper worked on nuclear physics and contributed substantially to the evidence of parity violation in weak interactions. He measured the circular polarization of gamma rays following a beta decay, thought unfeasible by Lee and Yang, and showed in the same experiment that the helicities of neutrino and antineutrino are opposite. Later, he was involved in an experiment to test time reversal symmetry. In 1956, he followed Fleischmann to the University of Erlangen where he continued to do research in optics and solid-state physics, with emphasis on thin metal layers, which he had started at Hamburg. Also he developed, along with Clausnitzer, the first source of polarised protons. In 1957 he became Privatdozent at the University of Erlangen.

From 1958 to 1961, Schopper was an associate professor at the University of Mainz where he established the Institute for Experimental Nuclear Physics. In 1960 and 1961 he worked under Robert R. Wilson at Cornell University to be introduced to elementary particle physics, namely the use of electron scattering to study the structure of the proton and neutron.

Schopper was appointed professor at the University of Karlsruhe in 1961 and director of the newly established Institutes for Experimental Nuclear Physics of TH Karlsruhe and the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Centre. In order to continue his research on electron scattering he set up a group to carry out one of the first experiments at DESY. He also created a group at CERN to investigate neutron scattering at high energies at the Proton Synchrotron (PS) and Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR). These experiments where then continued at the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Serpukhov, Russia. The group made important contributions to the study of neutron-proton and neutron-nuclei scattering cross sections. For this purpose, the first hadron calorimeter was developed and optimised by Monte Carlo simulations. Another group at Karlsruhe developed the first superconducting high frequency cavities in Europe, a technology which was transferred to CERN for particle separators and later for particle acceleration at LEP.