Hilda Hänchen

Hilda Hänchen (later Hilda Lindberg or Hilda Lindberg-Hänchen, 1 September 1919 - 19 October 2013) was a German physicist.

Life and work

Hilda Hänchen received her doctorate in 1943 from the University of Hamburg under the supervision of Fritz Goos, with a dissertation titled Über das Eindringen des totalreflektierten Lichtes in das dünnere Medium ("On the penetration of totally reflected light into the rarer medium"). During World War II she worked as a "managing" research assistant at the State Physics Institute in Hamburg (to allow male academics to return after military service, women could be employed as managing assistants only). She concurrently worked at the Physical-Chemical Research Institute in Kiel on war research contracts and was listed in the register of sponsorships of the Reichsforschungsrat ("Reich Research Council"). Around 1975 she was the chairperson of the local Cologne chapter of Deutscher Akademikerinnenbund ("Association of German women academics").

With her doctoral advisor Fritz Goos, Hänchen discovered the Goos–Hänchen effect, which is an optical phenomenon in which linearly polarized light undergoes a small lateral shift when totally internally reflected.

In 1946 she married physicist Albert Hermann Lindberg (born 1914), who before his retirement in 1979 served as the Vice President and Development Director of Leybold AG. They had three daughters - Renate, Claudia, and Dorothea.

Publications