Gerardus J. Sizoo Gerardus J. Sizoo Gerardus Johannes Sizoo (8 November 1900 – 4 January 1994) was the first professor of physics at the Vrije Universiteit. He is notable for the establishment and development of the applied physics laboratory in 1930 and the establishment of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at the Vrije Universiteit. His doctoral research explored the phenomenon of superconductivity at the University of Leiden, following the lead of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Wander Johannes de Haas. He completed his PhD in 1926, with a thesis entitled: "Onderzoekingen over den suprageleidenden toestand van metalen," under Wander Johannes de Haas. In
Giacinto Scoles conducted experiments on isotope separation during physical adsorption (physisorption). In 1961, he changed research area and joined Jan Beenakker’s group at the Kamerlingh-Onnes Laboratorium of Leiden University in the Netherlands. There he coauthored one of the very first papers [1] on what became soon known as the Senftleben-Beenakker effect: The influence of an external magnetic or electric field on the transport properties of dilute polyatomic gases. The idea behind this effect is that every polyatomic molecule – even a simple paramagnetic one like N – has a magnetic moment, due to its end-over-end rotation, which can be used as a