Georges Amsel
Georges Amsel was a French physicist, Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
Biography
Georges was born on 7 May 1933 in Budapest, Hungary to Hugo and Sara Amsel. After having been deported from Hungary in 1944, and finding refuge in Switzerlandin 1945, he undertook high-school studies in Geneva and then in Paris, continuing
on in the Physics Laboratory of Ecole Normale Supérieure to obtain his doctorate in nuclear
physics in 1963. During his doctoral study, and under the guidance of Pierre Aigrain he researched the possibilities for charged particle detection offered by semiconductor diodes and developed some of the first such detectors in 1959.
He was invited to the first conference on semiconductor detectors, held at Asheville, NC,
in 1960, where he presented the first Rutherford backscattering spectrometry to be obtained with a semiconductor detector. During this period, he studied low-energy nuclear
reactions on stable isotopes, developing anodizing methods for manufacturing
thin, self-supporting oxide films enriched in specific stable oxygen isotopes in collaboration
with David Samuel at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. With these targets, he discovered the
narrow resonances in the 18O15N nuclear reaction. These discoveries were immediately put
to use in the field of stable isotopic tracing of atomic transport processes during thin-film growth
and transformation.
In 1968, he headed the installation of the HVEC AN2500 accelerator in the Solid State Physics
group of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. it was one of the first nuclear particle accelerators to be installed in a condensed matter physics laboratory rather than in a nuclear physics laboratory. During this time,
he also laid down the foundations of the stochastic treatment of charged particle energy
loss processes, opening the way to rapid and accurate calculations of excitation curves obtained
around narrow nuclear resonances, and providing an approach to calculating
the overshoot on the leading edge, due to the Lewis effect. He has helped in setting up several IBA laboratories around the world and was the director of AGLAE, the accelerator at the Louvre museum dedicated to analysis of cultural heritage materials.
Awards and honors
- 1964, CNRS Bronze Medal.
- 1971, CNRS Silver Medal.
- 1984, .
- 1987, SERVANT prize of the French Academy of Sciences.
- 1989, Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters.
- 1993, Félix Robin prize from the French Physical Society.