ACS Award in Nuclear Chemistry

Winner of the 1999 ACS Award in Nuclear and Radiochemistry sponsored by Gordon and Breach Publishers    Dr. Karl-Ludwig Kratz Institut für Kernchemie, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany

Short Biography
Karl-Ludwig Kratz was born April 23, 1941, in Jena (Thüringen). Following military service where he reached rank of Major, he studied chemistry at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz under the direction of Professor Günter Herrmann. He received his Ph. D. in 1972 (summa cum laude) and Habilitation (venia legendi in Nuclear Chemistry) in 1979. His entire professional career has been spent at Mainz where he is now Hochschuldozent and Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy.
His research interests have led him to pursue a wide range of topics including studies of rapid radiochemical separations, nuclear structure and decay of neutron-rich nuclides of interest in astrophysics and instrumental neutron activation analysis that have been reported in ~150 papers in the scientific literature.
In his thesis work he developed fast radiochemical separations to study beta-decay properties of neutron-rich halogen isotopes, including work on the shortest isotope produced and studied radiochemically so far, 0.3 s Br-92.
Subsequently, working both with the Mainz TRIGA Reactor and at the OSTIS on-line mass separator at ILL in Grenoble, he led the development of high-resolution spectroscopy of beta-delayed neutrons, which put quantitative limits on the "Pandemonium" idea and demonstrated the importance of beta-delayed neutron spectra in nuclear structure studies and in development of reactor technology. His work also led to the establishment of the inverse relationship of beta-delayed neutron emission and neutron capture, and the first astrophysical application to isotopic anomalies in meteoritic inclusions.
In his studies of the decay of nuclides with A near 100 at both OSTIS and CERN-ISOLDE, he established systematics and nuclear-structure signatures for the beta-strength functions of neutron-rich isotopes and discovered identical ground-state bands in a number of these nuclides. His work also demonstrated the importance of nuclear structure for explosive nucleosynthesis and led to the identification of the first classical neutron-magic r-process "waiting-point" isotopes.
More recently, working at CERN-ISOLDE, he has stimulated a broad collaborative effort to develop chemically selective laser ionization to study decay of low-yield fission- and spallation-product nuclides that lie in the r-process path. The results include the use of hyperfine splitting for isotope and isomer separation of short-lived isotopes and the first experimental evidence for shell quenching far from stability.
Since the beginning of the 1990's, he has pursued determination of trace-element distributions in various environmental and geological samples using neutron activation and (radio-) chemical separation procedures.
Currently, he is involved with experimental programs at CERN-ISOLDE, Grenoble, GANIL-LISE, LISOL Louvain-la-Neuve, and the TRIGA Reactor in Mainz. He also maintains close collaboration with nuclear-structure theoreticians and astrophysicists as demonstrated in the list of selected publications shown below.

Selected publications

 For additional information, please link to his web site at http://www.kernchemie.uni-mainz.de/~klkratz/inhalt.html