After Bethe received his doctorate,
Erwin Madelung offered him an assistantship in Frankfurt, and in September 1928 Bethe moved in with his father, who had recently divorced his mother. His father had met Vera Congehl earlier that year and married her in 1929. They had two children, Doris, born in 1933, and Klaus, born in 1934. Bethe did not find the work in Frankfurt very stimulating, and in 1929 he accepted an offer from Ewald at the
Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. While there, he wrote what he considered to be his greatest paper,
Zur Theorie des Durchgangs schneller Korpuskularstrahlen durch Materie ("The Theory of the Passage of Fast Corpuscular Rays Through Matter"). Starting from
Max Born's interpretation of the
Schrödinger equation, Bethe produced a simplified formula for collision problems using a
Fourier transform, which is known today as the
Bethe formula. He submitted this paper for his
habilitation in 1930. Sommerfeld recommended Bethe for a
Rockefeller Foundation Travelling Scholarship in 1929. This provided $150 a month (about $,000 in dollars) to study abroad. In 1930, Bethe chose to do postdoctoral work at the
Cavendish Laboratory at the
University of Cambridge in England, where he worked under the supervision of
Ralph Fowler. At the request of
Patrick Blackett, who was working with
cloud chambers, Bethe created a
relativistic version of the Bethe formula. Bethe was known for his sense of humor, and with
Guido Beck and , two other postdoctoral
research fellows, created a
hoax paper On the Quantum Theory of the Temperature of Absolute Zero where he calculated the
fine structure constant from the absolute zero temperature in Celsius units. The paper poked fun at a certain class of papers in theoretical physics of the day, which were purely speculative and based on spurious numerical arguments, such as
Arthur Eddington's attempts to explain the value of the
fine structure constant from fundamental quantities in an earlier paper. They were forced to issue an apology. For the second half of his scholarship, Bethe chose to go to
Enrico Fermi's laboratory in Rome in February 1931. He was greatly impressed by Fermi and regretted that he had not gone to Rome first. Bethe developed the
Bethe ansatz, a method for finding the exact solutions for the
eigenvalues and
eigenvectors of certain one-dimensional quantum many-body models. He was influenced by Fermi's simplicity and Sommerfeld's rigor in approaching problems and these qualities influenced his own later research. The Rockefeller Foundation offered an extension of Bethe's fellowship, allowing him to return to Italy in 1932. In the meantime, Bethe worked for Sommerfeld at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München as a
privatdozent. Since Bethe was fluent in English, Sommerfeld had Bethe supervise all his English-speaking postdoctoral fellows, including
Lloyd P. Smith from
Cornell University. Bethe accepted a request from
Karl Scheel to write an article for the
Handbuch der Physik on the
quantum mechanics of hydrogen and helium. Reviewing the article decades later,
Robert Bacher and
Victor Weisskopf noted that it was unusual in the depth and breadth of its treatment of the subject that required very little updating for the 1959 edition. Bethe was then asked by Sommerfeld to help him with the
handbuch article on electrons in metals. The article covered the basis of what is now called
solid state physics. Bethe took a very new field and provided a clear, coherent, and complete coverage of it. His work on the
handbuch articles occupied most of his time in Rome, but he also co-wrote a paper with Fermi on another new field,
quantum electrodynamics, describing the relativistic interactions of charged particles. In 1932, Bethe accepted an appointment as an assistant professor at the
University of Tübingen, where
Hans Geiger was the professor of experimental physics. One of the first laws passed by the new
Nazi government was the
Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Due to his Jewish background, Bethe was dismissed from his job at the university, which was a government post. Geiger refused to help, but Sommerfeld immediately gave Bethe back his fellowship at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Sommerfeld spent much of the summer term of 1933 finding places for Jewish students and colleagues. Bethe left Germany in 1933, moving to England after receiving an offer for a position as lecturer at the
University of Manchester for a year through Sommerfeld's connection to
William Lawrence Bragg. He moved in with his friend
Rudolf Peierls and Peierls' wife Genia. Peierls was a fellow German physicist who had also been barred from academic positions in Germany because he was Jewish. This meant that Bethe had someone to speak to in German and he did not have to eat English food. Their relationship was professional as well as personal. Peierls aroused Bethe's interest in
nuclear physics. After
James Chadwick and
Maurice Goldhaber discovered the
photodisintegration of
deuterium, Chadwick challenged Bethe and Peierls to come up with a theoretical explanation of this phenomenon. This they did on the four-hour train ride from Cambridge back to Manchester. Bethe would investigate further in the years ahead. In 1933, the physics department at
Cornell University,
New York, was looking for a new theoretical physicist, and Lloyd Smith strongly recommended Bethe. This was supported by Bragg, who was visiting Cornell at the time. In August 1934, Cornell offered Bethe a position as an acting assistant professor. Bethe had already accepted a fellowship for a year to work with
Nevill Mott at the
University of Bristol for a semester, but Cornell agreed to let him start in the spring of 1935. Before leaving for the United States, he visited the
Niels Bohr Institute in
Copenhagen in September 1934, where he proposed to
Hilde Levi, who accepted. The match was opposed by Bethe's mother, who despite having a Jewish background, did not want him to marry a Jewish woman. A few days before their wedding date in December, Bethe broke off their engagement.
Niels Bohr and
James Franck were so shocked by this action by Bethe that he was not invited to the institute again until after
World War II. == United States ==