Walter Franz

For the Minnesota politician, see Walter Franz (politician).

Walter Franz (8 April 1911, in Munich – 16 February 1992, in Münster) was a German theoretical physicist who independently discovered the Franz–Keldysh effect.

Franz was a student of Arnold Sommerfeld at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, Germany. There he was granted the doctoral degree Dr.phil. in 1934. The (German) title of his dissertation was Comptoneffekt am gebundenen Elektron.^[1][2] In the preface to the book Optik, Sommerfeld cited him for "the most recent and particularly lucid treatment" of the vectorial generalization of Huygens’ principle.^[3]

With Adolf Kratzer, another student of Sommerfeld, Franz co-authored the book Transzendente Funktionen. The article in which Franz independently published the Franz–Keldysh effect was published in 1958.

Selected bibliography

• Adolf Kratzer and Walter Franz, Transzendente Funktionen (Akadem. Verl.-Ges. Geest & Portig, 1960)
• W. Franz, Die Streuung von Strahlung am magnetischen Elektron, Annalen der Physik 425, Issue 8, 689-707 (1938)
• Walter Franz, Einfluß eines elektrischen Feldes auf eine optische Absorptionskante, Z. Naturforschung 13a, 484-489 (1958)