 Although he came to Hamburg to work with Pauli , Rabi found Otto Stern working there with two English @-@ speaking postdoctoral fellows , Ronald Fraser and John Bradshaw Taylor . Rabi soon made friends with them , and became interested in their molecular beam experiments , for which Stern would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1943 . Their research involved non @-@ uniform magnetic fields , which were difficult to manipulate and hard to measure accurately . Rabi came up with the idea of using a uniform field instead , with the molecular beam at a glancing angle , so the atoms would be deflected like light through a prism . This would be easier to use , and produce more accurate results . Encouraged by Stern , and greatly assisted by Taylor , Rabi managed to get his idea to work . On Stern 's advice , Rabi wrote a letter about his results to Nature , which published it in February 1929 , followed by a paper entitled Zur Methode der <unk> von <unk> ( " On the method of deflection of molecular beams " ) to Zeitschrift für Physik , where it was published in April . 
