ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Erika Cremer (1900-1996): From fundamental contributions to quantum physics to gas chromatography

• In Event: Recovering the Histories of Women in Quantum Physics 2

English Abstract

Erika Cremer’s distinguished career spanned quantum physics, nuclear science, analytical, and catalytic chemistry. After earning her doctorate under Max Bodenstein in Berlin in 1927, she joined Fritz Haber’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. Between 1928 and 1933, working with Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Harteck, and Adalbert and Ladislaus Farkas, Cremer helped obtain experimental evidence for the two allotropic forms of molecular hydrogen—orthohydrogen (parallel proton spins) and parahydrogen (antiparallel proton spins). The enrichment of gaseous hydrogen with parahydrogen (J = 0) was achieved at cryogenic temperatures using a charcoal catalyst. The study of the ortho–para conversion mechanism advanced when Ladislaus Farkas and Hans Sachsse identified the catalytic role of paramagnetic species in 1933. That same year, Cremer, Michael Polanyi, and the Farkas brothers explored the conversion in solid hydrogen; Cremer extended this work in 1935 by investigating catalysis by solid oxygen.

In 1937, Otto Hahn secured her a fellowship at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, and in 1939 Peter Debye recruited her to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics to work on isotope separation, linking her to the German nuclear program. Cremer received her habilitation in Berlin in 1938 and joined the University of Innsbruck in 1941, where she developed gas chromatography. Her seminal 1951 paper on gas separation and adsorption energies, delayed by the war, anticipated discoveries later recognized with a Nobel Prize, though her own contributions remained largely unacknowledged. After the war, she rebuilt Innsbruck’s Physical Chemistry Institute, became its director in 1951 and full professor in 1959, and led pioneering work in chromatography, reaction kinetics, isotope separation, and catalysis.

Author

• Bretislav Friedrich, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft