Elizabeth Monroe Boggs: Cornell University and World War II

Fortunately, when Monroe returned to the US, the Cornell research assistantship had remained unfilled, and in February 1940 she joined John G. Kirkwood’s theoretical chemistry group. There, she quickly identified the first-order nature of the hard sphere crystallization transition by combining approaches developed by Lennard-Jones and by her new supervisor. That foundational result led to a series of joint publications, but little immediate external visibility. Meanwhile, in 1941 she married her officemate and fellow Kirkwood group member Fitzhugh W. Boggs. From that point on, their two professional courses became strongly entangled.

When in 1942 Fitzhugh joined Edward Condon’s group at the Westinghouse Research Laboratory in Pittsburgh for war-related work, she took on a lecturer position at the University of Pittsburgh. A year later, she became a research associate at the Explosives Research Laboratory in nearby Bruceton, Pennsylvania. Although access to many aspects of her work there remains restricted, we know that she was involved in the Manhattan Project. Most notably, she worked out the explosive lensing process so as to trigger criticality in nuclear devices. A similar but independently developed concept was ultimately implemented at Los Alamos in the design of the Trinity test and the “Fat Man” plutonium bomb.

Context and sources: Hard sphere crystallization

Context and sources: Work at the Explosives Research Laboratory

Cite this resource

Patrick Charbonneau, “Elizabeth Monroe Boggs,” Women in the History of Quantum Physics collection, American Institute of Physics, 2026, https://www.aip.org/history/elizabeth-monroe-boggs.