Our history

What is now the Max-Planck-Institute for Physics was founded in Berlin in 1917 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (KWI for Physics). Its first director was Albert Einstein, who led the institute until his emigration to the United States in 1933.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Einstein and his mentor Max Planck had ushered in a new era in physics, which earned both of them the Nobel Prize. Max Planck received the Nobel Prize in 1918 for his work on quantum physics. In 1921, Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the law governing the photoelectric effect. Max von Laue, who had already received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for the discovery of X-ray interference, joined the KWI for Physics as deputy director in 1922. After Einstein’s departure in 1933, Peter Debye, a Dutch physicist and 1936 Nobel laureate in Chemistry, headed the institution.

The Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science (KWG) had been the sponsoring body for leading scientific institutes in Germany since 1911, which were primarily dedicated to basic research. After World War II, the KWG was renamed the Max Planck Society upon its reestablishment. As early as 1938—ten years before the founding of the Max Planck Society—the Institute for Physics was given the additional name “Max Planck Institute.” An agreement between the American Rockefeller Foundation and the Third Reich made it possible to finance the construction of the institute’s building in Berlin.

After the outbreak of World War II, German military authorities began setting up a secret uranium project at the KWI for Physics in 1939. Renowned researchers such as Werner Heisenberg, Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and Otto Hahn were appointed to the so-called “Uranverein.” The goal was to develop a nuclear reactor for energy production, but also to build an atomic bomb.

By 1942, the scientists had achieved some success, at least on a theoretical level. However, developing a nuclear weapon would have taken years, and the investment costs would have been enormous. Since the German Reich was forced to scale back its military efforts at that time, the development of an atomic bomb took a back seat. The project was transferred to civilian administration.

From 1917 to 1933, the main task of the KWI for Physics was to distribute financial and material resources to institutions in Germany in order to promote research in physics. After Albert Einstein’s departure in 1933, the Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate in Chemistry, Peter Debye, took over as director of the institute. Beginning in 1936, he launched a modernization phase that included the construction of a “lightning mast” for high-voltage atomic experiments and the installation of equipment for studying superconductivity.

It was only from this point on that the KWI for Physics became an institute with its own research agenda. Since then, the scientists have been addressing the most fundamental questions in particle physics, astro(particle) physics, and fusion physics.

The two most important areas of research following the institute’s reopening in 1946 were nuclear physics - on which Heisenberg had increasingly focused during his years in Berlin - and the study of cosmic rays. In addition, plasma physics, particularly nuclear fusion, began to play an important role. The Allied Control Council had severely restricted research into energy production from nuclear fission in postwar Germany.

In 1947, an astrophysics department was founded under the direction of Ludwig Biermann, focusing on the theoretical analysis of highly ionized gases and their interaction with magnetic fields. The explanation of the solar wind (1951), which was later confirmed by space research, was one of the most important results of this research. As a result, a separate department of astrophysics was established at the institute in 1956.

In 1955, Heisenberg decided to shift the MPP’s focus from classical nuclear physics and nuclear fission technology to two important new areas of research that were attracting increasing attention:

• Thermonuclear fusion processes
• Elementary particle physics and experiments at particle accelerators

As far as high-energy particle physics was concerned, Heisenberg played a key role in the founding of CERN. Heisenberg was Germany’s official representative at the UNESCO conference in Paris in 1951, where the first resolution to establish the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) was adopted. In this capacity, he convinced the German government of the time to become one of the six founding members and to provide the necessary funding for CERN. Heisenberg also supported increased participation by the MPP in experiments at CERN as well as at the “German Electron Synchrotron” (DESY). Founded in 1959 in Hamburg, DESY was the second European accelerator center to study high-energy particle collisions.

Starting in the 1980s, the MPP was one of the driving forces behind what would later become the ATLAS project at CERN. In the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator ring, the gigantic ATLAS detector records and analyzes particle decays following proton-proton collisions. Under the leadership of directors Friedrich Dydak, Volker Soergel, and finally Siegfried Bethke, key components for the detector were developed and constructed at the institute.

Julius Wess, who was appointed to the Max Planck Institute for Physics in 1990, was one of the most outstanding researchers of the past 50 years. With his formulation of supersymmetry, he created a groundbreaking model for elementary particle physics, for which, however, there is still no experimental confirmation to this day.

Since the start of the new millennium, research at the MPP has focused on theoretical models and experiments in search of “New Physics.” The particles of matter and the exchange forces (strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions) with which they interact are described in the compact and extensively verified Standard Model of particle physics, which is being continually refined thanks to new experimental results. However, the Standard Model describes only a small part of the physics of the universe. For many observable phenomena, there must therefore necessarily be physics beyond the Standard Model. Examples of this include

• the existence of dark matter,
• the accelerated expansion of the universe,
• the fact that matter dominates the universe—whereas antimatter is no longer present

Furthermore, the Standard Model cannot reconcile gravity - the ubiquitous force in the cosmos - with the exchange forces it describes.

In 1960, two years after the institute moved from Göttingen to Munich, the Institute for Plasma Physics was founded in Garching - a move by which the scientific leadership under Heisenberg responded to the growing need for new energy sources in Germany. Today, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics - which has been independent since 1971 - is regarded as one of the world’s leading research centers for the development of a fusion reactor. Twenty years later, in 1991, the sub-institutes for Astrophysics and Extraterrestrial Physics became independent institutes. Reimar Lüst, who later became president of the Max Planck Society, took over as director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

In 1992, the Max Planck Institutes for Physics and Extraterrestrial Physics established a joint semiconductor laboratory. Today’s Max Planck Semiconductor Laboratory develops detectors for particle physics and astronomy. Since 1993, there has also been another “grandchild institute” of the MPI for Physics: the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam.