Georges Amsel

Georges Amsel (7 May 1933 – 11 March 2017) was a French physicist, Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

Biography Georges was born on 7 May 1933 in Budapest, Hungary to Hugo and Sara (Fried) Amsel. After having been deported from Hungary in 1944, and finding refuge in Switzerland in 1945, he undertook high-school studies in Geneva and then in Paris, continuing on in the Physics Laboratory of Ecole Normale Supérieure to obtain his doctorate in nuclear physics in 1963. During his doctoral study, and under the guidance of Pierre Aigrain he researched the possibilities for charged particle detection offered by semiconductor diodes and developed some of the first such detectors in 1959. He was invited to the first conference on semiconductor detectors, held at Asheville, NC, in 1960, where he presented the first Rutherford backscattering spectrometry to be obtained with a semiconductor detector. 1987, SERVANT prize of the French Academy of Sciences. 1989, Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters. 1993, Félix Robin prize from the French Physical Society. Member of Société Française de Physique, Institute of Physics.