Felix Boehm

Felix Hans Boehm (June 9, 1924, Basel – May 25, 2021, Altadena, California) was a Swiss-American experimental physicist, known for his research on weak interactions, parity violation, and neutrino physics.

Biography He had four brothers and both his father and his paternal grandfather were in the publishing business. Felix Boehm completed his Matura in 1943 and was drafted into Swiss army, which allowed him to study physics part-time at the University of Geneva. In the autumn of 1943 he matriculated at ETH Zurich. There he took several classes from Wolfgang Pauli and graduated in physics with his Diplom in 1948 and his doctorate in 1951 with doctoral advisor Paul Scherrer. Boehm worked as an assistant to Scherrer from 1951 to March 1952 and then went as a Boese Fellow to Columbia University, where he studied with C. S. Wu for a year and a half. As a postdoctoral research fellow he went in July 1953 to Caltech, where he studied with Jesse DuMond and Charles Lauritsen. In 1957, Boehm married Ruth Sommerhalder, whom he met in 1956 at a social occasion at the Swiss consulate in Los Angeles.

He held visiting positions in 1957/58 at Heidelberg University (at the invitation of Jensen), and in 1979/80 at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, Beginning in 1970 he collaborated extensively with the theorist Petr Vogel.

In 1980, Boehm received the Humboldt Research Award.

In 1995, he received the Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics with citation:

In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Upon his death in 2021, he was survived by his widow and their two sons.