Harald Friedrich (19 May 1947 – 29 January 2017) was a German physicist specializing in theoretical
atomic physics.
Friedrich was born in Berlin and grew up in Australia. He studied physics at the
University of Kiel and the
University of Freiburg, and completed his doctoral studies in 1975 at the
University of Münster with a dissertation on the microscopic description of the scattering of light and medium-weight nuclei. Subsequently, he was a postdoctoral student at the
University of Oxford. In 1980 he habilitated as a professor at the
University of Münster and was at
Caltech from 1981 to 1983 on a Heisenberg scholarship. He taught at the universities of
Munich and
Tübingen before becoming a professor at the
Technical University of Munich in 1987.
Friedrich initially dealt with theoretical
nuclear physics before switching to atomic physics. In the 1980s, he studied
quantum chaos phenomena in highly excited atoms and their semi-classical treatment, in part with his doctoral student Dieter Wintgen. He is also well-known through his textbook on theoretical atomic physics.
Friedrich, Harald; Jacoby, Georg; Meister, Carlo G. (27 February 2002). "Quantum reflection by Casimir–van der Waals potential tails". Physical Review A. 65 (3). American Physical Society (APS): 032902.
Bibcode:
2002PhRvA..65c2902F.
doi:
10.1103/physreva.65.032902.
ISSN1050-2947.