Walter Franz (8 April 1911, in Munich – 16 February 1992, in Münster) was a German theoretical physicist who independently discovered the Franz–Keldysh effect.
Franz was a student of Arnold Sommerfeld at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, Germany.
The (German) title of his dissertation was Comptoneffekt am gebundenen Elektron.
[1][2] In the preface to the book Optik, Sommerfeld cited him for "the most recent and particularly lucid treatment" of the vectorial generalization of Huygens’ principle.
[3] With Adolf Kratzer, another student of Sommerfeld, Franz co-authored the book Transzendente Funktionen.