Walter Franz

Who was Walter Franz?

Walter Franz was a theoretical physicist who independently discovered the Franz–Keldysh effect.

Franz was a student of Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich. He was granted his Ph.D. in 1934. In the preface to the book Optik, Sommerfeld cited him for “the most recent and particularly lucid treatment” of the vectorial generalization of Hauygens’ principle.

With Adolf Kratzer, another student of Sommerfeld, Franz co-authored the book Transzendente Funktionen. An academic descendent of Franz, Ludwig Tewordt, is cited as having received his Ph.D. at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, in 1953. The article in which Franz independently published the Franz-Keldysh effect was published in 1958.