Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics. He described the class of MHD waves now known as Alfvén waves.
Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics. He described the class of MHD waves now known as Alfvén waves.
Born: 30 May 1908, Norrköping, Sweden
Died: 2 April 1995, Djursholm, Sweden

Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén was born in Norrköping, Sweden. Hannes Alfvén studied at Uppsala University from 1926, he obtained the degree of doctor of philosophy in 1934, in this same year he was appointed lecturer in physics at Uppsala University. In 1937 he became a research physicist at the Nobel Institute for Physics in Stockholm, in 1940 he was appointed Professor in the Theory of Electricity at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Professor of Electronics in 1945, and Professor of Plasma Physics in 1963. Since 1967 he has been visiting professor of Physics at the University of California at San Diego.

During the late 1930s and early ’40s he made remarkable contributions to space physics, including the theorem of frozen-in flux, according to which under certain conditions a plasma is bound to the magnetic lines of flux that pass through it. Alfvén later used the concept to explain the origin of cosmic rays.
In 1939 Alfvén published his theory of magnetic storms and auroral displays in the atmosphere, which immensely influenced the modern theory of the magnetosphere (the region of Earth’s magnetic field). He discovered a widely used mathematical approximation by which the complex spiral motion of a charged particle in a magnetic field can be easily calculated. Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), the study of plasmas in magnetic fields, was largely pioneered by Alfvén, and his work has been acknowledged as fundamental to attempts to control nuclear fusion.

Professor Alfvén published a number of papers in physics and astrophysics, and the following monographs: Cosmical Electrodynamics, 1948; Origin of the Solar System, 1956; and together with C.-G. Fälthammar, Cosmical Electrodynamics, Fundamental Principles, 1963.