Sir Charles Frank

Sir Charles Frank (born March 6, 1911, Durban, South Africa—died April 5, 1998, Bristol, England) was an English physicist known for his work in the study of crystals.

Though born in South Africa, Frank was raised in his parents’ native England, to which they returned only a few months after his birth. Frank received a scholarship to Lincoln College, Oxford, from which he graduated with degrees in chemistry (B.A., 1932; B.Sc., 1933). He then researched dielectrics at Oxford’s engineering laboratory, receiving a doctorate in 1937.

From 1936 to 1938 Frank worked with Dutch physicist Peter Debye at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics at Berlin, and from 1939 to 1940 he worked at the Colloid Science Laboratory at Cambridge, England. In 1940 he was a chemist at the Chemical Defence Experimental Station at Porton Down, Wiltshire. He then joined the Assistant Directorate of Intelligence (Science) at the Air Ministry, where he remained for the rest of World War II, analyzing intelligence about Germany’s radar defenses and V-1 and V-2 missile programs. His fluency in German and his knowledge of German science proved useful, and he was particularly skillful at finding minute, but significant, details on aerial reconnaissance photographs.

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In 1946 Frank joined the physics department of the University of Bristol, where he spent the rest of his career. He became a professor in 1954.

In 1947 Cecil Powell, a colleague of Frank’s at Bristol, recorded nuclear interactions on photographic plates that seemed to show traces of the pion, or pi-meson, a particle whose existence had been theorized since 1935. Frank sought an alternative explanation for Powell’s data, but eventually he concluded that the pion was the likeliest one (and indeed Powell went on to win a Nobel Prize in 1950 for his discovery). However, as one of his proposed alternatives, Frank suggested a phenomenon now known as muon-catalyzed fusion, in which fusion reactions happen by causing a deuterium nucleus, a tritium nucleus, and a muon to form what is called a muonic molecule. In 1956 American physicist Luis W. Alvarez and his collaborators were the first to observe muon-catalyzed fusion.

Frank mainly studied dislocations in crystals, which are line defects that may run the length of the crystal. In 1947 Frank was asked to teach a course on crystal growth, a subject on which he had no real expertise. While preparing the course, he noticed that the then-current theory of crystal growth completely failed to predict observed growth rates. He proposed at a conference in Bristol in 1949 that spiral features called screw dislocations would provide a place for crystal growth to happen that could explain the observed rates. In a startling coincidence, at that same conference shortly after Frank’s presentation, mineralogist L.J. Griffin (who had been working independently of Frank) confirmed Frank’s theory by presenting the first photographs of screw dislocations. In 1950 Frank and American physicist Thornton Read simultaneously discovered what came to be known as the Frank-Read mechanism for generating dislocations in a crystal.

Frank also worked in other areas of physics. His 1958 paper on the theory of liquid crystals was a significant contribution to this emerging field. He also wrote several papers about geophysics.

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Frank was appointed officer of the British Empire (OBE) in 1946 and was knighted in 1977. In 1954 he became a fellow of the Royal Society, which awarded him the Copley Medal in 1994.