2007 Seaborg Award: Norbert G. Trautmann

Friedlander recalls, from visits to INC, Trautmann’s boundless energy. “He really seems to be the one who keeps all the wheels in the institute turning,” he says. “His nonstop work habits are legendary. Time and time again, I have seen experiments and projects on the verge of foundering until Trautmann came to the rescue and led them to success.”

Trautmann’s work at the research reactor was also seminal. Guenter F. Herrmann, his thesis adviser at Mainz, rates Trautmann’s development of rapid chemical separation techniques and resonance ionization mass spectrometry (RIMS) of actinide elements as major accomplishments. “Trautmann was the first to master complicated separation schemes involving several steps on a time scale of seconds,” Hermann says. “This made numerous new nuclides in the complex fission product mixture accessible for study.”

Trautmann says these methods enabled measurements of the fission properties of short-lived isotopes. Using a centrifuge system developed with international partners, Trautmann then focused on chemical properties of transactinide elements with atomic numbers of 104 or greater.

RIMS was used by Trautmann and coworkers to determine the first ionization potential of the elements americium through einsteinium for the first time and for the ultratrace analysis of transuranium elements, particularly plutonium.