Leif Tronstad: the heavy water hero
The chemist who ended Nazi attempts to make an atomic bomb
Leif Tronstad was once called the worst student ever accepted into the chemical engineering programme at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. He turned out to be perhaps its most brilliant graduate. By the late 1920s, the young inorganic chemist used ellipsometry to show some metals had a thin, protective oxide layer. Today, it’s a standard technique in thin film chemistry and physics – at the time, it solved why some metals, contrary to their electrode potentials, will not corrode. But Tronstad’s name will forever be attached to something else: heavy water.