He was born on October 23, 1905 in Zurich, Switzerland. His father, Gustav Bloch, was a grain wholesaler in Zurich. He entered public elementary school at the age of 6 and initially struggled because he spoke Swiss German with a different accent than his peers. In 1918 he began attending a gymnasium run by the canton of Zurich. The young man
He excelled in mathematics and science and in 1924 he passed his “matura” an exam that allowed him to pass to an institution of higher learning.
Initially he planned to study engineering and entered the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. After a year he changed his mind and began to study physics and continued at the same institution, graduating in 1927.
After graduating he went to the University of Lepzig, where he studied with Werner Heisenberg, completing his Ph.D. in 1928. His doctoral thesis introduced the concept of Bloch waves to explain the behavior of electrons in crystals, developing the theory of metallic conduction.
After finishing his doctorate he took a tour of the various centers of experimental physics in Europe that worked for Wolfgang Pauli at the University of Zurich, Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and Enrico Fermi in Rome, before returning to the University of Lepzig as a professor of physics.
In 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, emigrated to the United States, occupying a position at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Bloch became Stanford’s first professor of theoretical physics in 1939.
During World War II he worked on nuclear energy at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory and on ways to interfere with radar at Harvard University. After the war he returned to Stanford.
Bloch He is most famous for his work developing the theory of nuclear induction and magnetic resonance imaging. Atoms that have an unequal number of protons and / or neutrons have an intrinsic magnetic moment and an angular momentum. This is called spin. When placed in a magnetic field, the nuclei will emit electromagnetic radiation, as their spin will align with the magnetic field. The frequency of this emission depends on the strength of the magnetic field and the isotope. By measuring these emissions it is possible to determine the chemical structure in which the atom resides. This technique is used by chemists to determine the structure of compounds and is used in medical imaging and is called magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI (the name was changed to remove the word “nuclear”).
For his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance Bloch he won the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Edward Mills Purcell who developed the theory simultaneously.
In 1952, Bloch he became the first director of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and formulated its first policies regarding atomic research. Since as director he had little time for research, he returned to Stanford the following year. In 1965 he served as president of the American Physical Society.
Felix bloch died on September 10, 1983.