Wolfgang Helfrich


Wolfgang Helfrich was a German physicist and inventor who made contributions to twisted-nematic liquid crystal technology, which is used to produce a variety of modern LCD electronic displays, and in the field of biomembranes.

Career

Helfrich studied physics in Munich, Göttingen, and Tübingen. Helfrich joined RCA in 1967, became interested in Charles-Victor Mauguin's twisted structure, and thought it might be used to create an electronic display. However, RCA showed little interest, because they felt that any effect that used two polarizers would also have a large amount of light absorption, requiring it to be brightly lit.
In 1970, Helfrich left RCA and joined the Central Research Laboratories of Hoffmann-LaRoche in Switzerland, where he teamed up with Swiss physicist Martin Schadt, a solid-state physicist. Schadt built a sample with electrodes and a twisted version of a liquid-crystal material called PEBAB, which Helfrich had reported in prior studies at RCA, as part of their guest-host experiments.
From 1973 until his retirement in 1997, Helfrich worked for Free University of Berlin. In 1973, Wolfgang Helfrich published the first complete description of the bending energy of membranes. In 1978, he set up the first theory of the steric repulsion of membranes caused by shape fluctuations. In the 1970s and following decades, Wolfgang Helfrich made numerous theoretical and experimental contributions to membrane physics, in particular on vesicle shapes, membrane shape fluctuations, and the effect of electric fields on vesicles.
Helfrich lived in Berlin where he died on 28 September 2025, at the age of 93.

Works

Untersuchungen an raumladungsbeschränkten Defektelektronenströmen in Anthrazen - Munich 1961Raumladungsbeschränkte Ströme in Anthrazen als Mittel zur Bestimmung der Beweglichkeit von Defektelektronen - Munich 1961Space-charge-limited and volume-controlled currents in organic solid - Munich 1967

Awards