Bernard Abram Lippmann.[1][2] (August 18, 1914 – February 12, 1988)[3] was an American theoretical physicist. A former Professor of Physics at New York University, Lippmann is mainly known for the Lippmann-Schwinger equation, a widely used tool in non-relativistic scattering theory, which he formulated together with his doctoral supervisor Julian Schwinger[4]
Biography
Bernard Lippmann was born in Brooklyn, New York City, in 1914.[5] After initially attending the Polytechnic School of Brooklyn, where he attained a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, he switched to physics and was admitted to the degree of Master of Science at the University of Michigan in 1935[6]
Subsequently, Lippmann entered the industry, where he held various engineering roles until the entry of the United States into the Second World War when he joined MIT's Radiation Laboratory. From 1941 until the end of the war, he conducted experimental and theoretical research on the X band and K band regions of the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum, specifically in their generation by circuitry, as well as similar work on directional couplers and microwave junctions. After the war, in 1946, he began his Doctor of Philosophy degree at Harvard under the supervision of Schwinger,[7] while also leading the radar receiver group at the Submarine Signal Company in Boston (later amalgamated into Raytheon).
For his doctoral thesis, Lippmann collaborated with Schwinger to produce the Lippmann-Schwinger equation, an integral equation formulation of the Schrödinger equation intended to calculate scattering cross-sections since the required boundary conditions are implicit in the formalism.[8] The equation is the basis for the majority of calculations pertaining to non-relativistic scattering processes, finding application in atomic, molecular, and optical physics, as well as low-energy nuclear physics and particle physics.
