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Concept
Fritz London
Summary
Fritz Wolfgang London (March 7, 1900 – March 30, 1954) was a German born physicist and professor at Duke University. His fundamental contributions to the theories of chemical bonding and of intermolecular forces (London dispersion forces) are today considered classic and are discussed in standard textbooks of physical chemistry. With his brother Heinz London, he made a significant contribution to understanding electromagnetic properties of superconductors with the London equations and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on five separate occasions.
London was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland) as the son of Franz London (1863-1917). Being a Jew, London lost his position at the University of Berlin after Hitler's Nazi Party passed the 1933 racial laws. He took visiting positions in England and France, and emigrated to the United States in 1939, of which he became a naturalized citizen in 1945. Later in his life, London was a professor at Duke University. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1953. He died from a heart ailment in Durham, North Carolina, in 1954.
London's early work with Walter Heitler on chemical bonding is now treated in any textbook on physical chemistry. This paper was the first to properly explain the bonding in a homonuclear molecule such as H2. It is no coincidence that the Heitler–London work appeared shortly after the introduction of quantum mechanics by Heisenberg and Schrödinger, because quantum mechanics was crucial in their explanation of the covalent bond. Another necessary ingredient was the realization that electrons are indistinguishable, as expressed in the Pauli principle.
Other early work of London was in the area of intermolecular forces. He coined the expression "dispersion effect" for the attraction between two rare gas atoms at large (say about 1 nanometer) distance from each other. Nowadays this attraction is often referred to as "London force". In 1930 he gave (together with R.
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