Dr. Gordon Drake
Fellow
Current Employer
University of Windsor
Election Year
1986
Academy
Académie des sciences
Discipline
Physics
Department
Department of Physics
Gordon Drake has made important contributions to the field of Atomic Physics. In particular he gave the first correct evaluation of the radiative decay rate of metastable helium atoms. He also developed a unified relativistic treatment of radiative transitions in helium-like ions and developed a new method for measuring the Lamb shift. This new method allowed the very accurate measurement of lifetimes of excited states of the hydrogen atom.