Dehmelt, Hans Georg

Dehmelt, Hans Georg häns gāˈôrkh dāˈməlt [key], 1922–2017, German-American physicist, b. Gorlitz, Germany, Ph.D. Univ. of Göttingen, 1950. A professor at the Univ. of Washington in Seattle, where he taught from 1955 to 2002, Dehmelt developed an ion-trap technique known as the Penning trap, which made possible the detailed study of subatomic particles; another method for trapping ions was developed simultaneously by Wolfgang Paul. For their inventions, Dehmelt and Paul shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics with Norman F. Ramsey.

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