Henry Primakoff

Henry Primakoff (; February 12, 1914 – July 25, 1983) was an American theoretical physicist who is famous for his discovery of the Primakoff effect.

Primakoff contributed to the understanding of weak interactions, double beta decay, spin waves in ferromagnetism, and the interaction between neutrinos and the atomic nucleus. Along with Theodore Holstein, Primakoff also developed the Holstein–Primakoff transformation which is designed to treat spin waves as bosonic excitations.

Life Henry Primakoff was born in 1914 in Odesa, Russian Empire, were married in the office of the Municipal Rabbi of Odesa on June 30, 1913. His mother and his grandparents decided to escape from Russia to the United States, through Romania and later Germany, where they finally took a steamship. They settled in New York City in 1922

During World War II, J. Robert Oppenheimer tried to convince him to join the Manhattan Project, but Primakoff declined due the short time to make the atomic bomb.