- US nuclear physicist
who made pioneering studies of nuclear structure and the elementary
nuclear constituents, the proton and the neutron. He established that
the proton and neutron were not pointlike, but had a definite volume
and shape. He shared the 1961 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Hofstadter demonstrated that the nucleus is composed of a high-energy
core and a surrounding area of decreasing density.
He helped to construct a new high-energy accelerator at Stanford University,
California, with which he showed that the proton and the neutron have
complex structures and cannot be considered elementary particles.
Hofstadter was born in New York and educated at City College and Princeton.
From 1950 he was at Stanford, where his early work involved bouncing,
or scattering, electrons from complex nuclei, such as gold. This produced
accurate pictures of the charge distribution within nuclei. Gradually,
smaller nuclei were studied by Hofstadter and his team, using electrons
of increasing energy. By 1960, accurate data had been obtained for the
proton and neutron, revealing the spatial distribution of charge and
magnetization within these particles.
|