Sir Peter Hirsch FRS | |
---|---|
Born | 16 January 1925 98) | (age
Alma mater | Christ's College, Cambridge St Catharine's College, Cambridge |
Known for | Transmission Electron Microscopy Physics |
Relatives | Afua Hirsch (great-niece) |
Awards | Franklin J. Clamer Medal (1970) Hughes Medal (1973) Royal Medal (1977) Wolf Prize in Physics (1983/4) Holweck Meda (1988) Lomonosov Gold Medal of Russian Academy of Sciences (2005) Fellow of the Royal Society |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Materials Science |
Institutions | University of Oxford |
Thesis | An X-ray micro-beam technique (1951) |
Doctoral advisor | W.H. Taylor [1] |
Doctoral students | Michael J Whelan [1] |
Sir Peter Bernhard Hirsch HonFRMS FRS (born 16 January 1925) is a British metallurgist who has made fundamental contributions to the application of transmission electron microscopy to metals. [2] [3]
Born in 1925, Hirsch lived in Germany until 1939; he was one of hundreds of Jewish children that escaped Germany via the various Kindertransport missions that saved many such children from the impending dangers of World War II and the Holocaust. [4]
Hirsch attended Sloane Grammar School, Chelsea, and St Catharine's College, Cambridge. In 1946 he joined the Crystallography Department of the Cavendish to work for a PhD on work hardening in metals under W. H. Taylor and Lawrence Bragg. [5] He subsequently carried out work, which is still cited, on the structure of coal.
In the mid-1950s, he pioneered the application of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to metals and developed in detail the theory needed to interpret such images. He was a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge from 1960 to 1966 and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Christ's in 1978. In 1965, with Howie, Whelan, Pashley and Nicholson, he published the text Electron microscopy of thin crystals. [6] [7] The following year he moved to Oxford to take up the Isaac Wolfson Chair in Metallurgy, succeeding William Hume-Rothery. He held this post until his retirement in 1992, building up the Department of Metallurgy (now the Department of Materials) into a world-renowned centre. Among many other honours, he was awarded the 1983 Wolf Foundation Prize in physics. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1963 and knighted in 1975.
Hirsch was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for experimentally establishing the role of dislocations in plastic flow and of electron microscopy as a tool for materials research. He is also a fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
His great-niece is the writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch. [8]
The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and is part of the School of Physical Sciences. The laboratory was opened in 1874 on the New Museums Site as a laboratory for experimental physics and is named after the British chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish. The laboratory has had a huge influence on research in the disciplines of physics and biology.
Electron diffraction is a general term for phenomena associated with changes in the direction of electron beams due to elastic interactions with atoms. Close to the atoms the changes are described as Fresnel diffraction; far away they are called Fraunhofer diffraction. The resulting map of the directions of the electrons far from the sample is called a diffraction pattern, see for instance Figure 1. These patterns are similar to x-ray and neutron diffraction patterns, and are used to study the atomic structure of gases, liquids, surfaces and bulk solids. Electron diffraction also plays a major role in the contrast of images in electron microscopes.
Sir William Lawrence Bragg, was an Australian-born British physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer (1912) of Bragg's law of X-ray diffraction, which is basic for the determination of crystal structure. He was joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915, "For their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays"; an important step in the development of X-ray crystallography.
Sir Nevill Francis Mott was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 for his work on the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, especially amorphous semiconductors. The award was shared with Philip W. Anderson and J. H. Van Vleck. The three had conducted loosely related research. Mott and Anderson clarified the reasons why magnetic or amorphous materials can sometimes be metallic and sometimes insulating.
Archibald "Archie" Howie is a British physicist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge, known for his pioneering work on the interpretation of transmission electron microscope images of crystals. Born in 1934, he attended Kirkcaldy High School and the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he subsequently took up a permanent post. He has been a fellow of Churchill College since its foundation, and was President of its Senior Combination Room (SCR) until 2010.
The Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, England was founded in the 1950s as the Department of Metallurgy, by William Hume-Rothery, who was a reader in Oxford's Department of Inorganic Chemistry. It is part of the university's Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division
David John Hugh Cockayne FRS FInstP was Professor in the physical examination of materials in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford and professorial fellow at Linacre College from 2000 to 2009. He was the president of the International Federation of Societies for Microscopy from 2003 till 2007, then vice-president 2007 to 2010.
Dark-field microscopy describes microscopy methods, in both light and electron microscopy, which exclude the unscattered beam from the image. Consequently, the field around the specimen is generally dark.
Sir Alan Howard Cottrell, FRS was an English metallurgist and physicist. He was also former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government and vice-chancellor of Cambridge University 1977–1979.
The Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy (DMSM) is a large research and teaching division of the University of Cambridge. Since 2013 it has been located in West Cambridge, having previously occupied several buildings on the New Museums Site in the centre of Cambridge.
Kikuchi lines are patterns of electrons formed by scattering. They pair up to form bands in electron diffraction from single crystal specimens, there to serve as "roads in orientation-space" for microscopists uncertain of what they are looking at. In transmission electron microscopes, they are easily seen in diffraction from regions of the specimen thick enough for multiple scattering. Unlike diffraction spots, which blink on and off as one tilts the crystal, Kikuchi bands mark orientation space with well-defined intersections as well as paths connecting one intersection to the next.
Vernon Ellis Cosslett, FRS was a British microscopist.
Michael John Whelan HonFRMS FRS FInstP is a British scientist.
Brian Leonard Eyre CBE, FRS, FREng was a British material scientist, Chief Executive of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and Professor at the University of Liverpool. He was also a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford and University College London.
Zone axis, a term sometimes used to refer to "high-symmetry" orientations in a crystal, most generally refers to any direction referenced to the direct lattice of a crystal in three dimensions. It is therefore indexed with direct lattice indices, instead of with Miller indices.
John Charles Howorth Spence ForMemRS HonFRMS was Richard Snell Professor of Physics at Arizona State University and Director of Science at the National Science Foundation BioXFEL Science and Technology Center.
Laurence (Laurie) Marks is an American professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University (1985–present). He is known for contributions to the study of nanoparticles as well as work in the fields of electron microscopy, diffraction and crystallography. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society. He was awarded the Warren Award by the American Crystallographic Association in 2015 for his contributions to electron diffraction, and the 2017 ICSOS Surface Structure Prize for his contribution to surface structure determination applying both experimental and theoretical methods.
Peter Duncumb is a British physicist specialising in X-ray microscopy and microanalysis. He is best known for his contribution to the development of the first electron microprobe.
The Department of Materials is responsible for the teaching and research in materials science and engineering at Imperial College London, occupying the Royal School of Mines and Bessemer buildings on the South Kensington campus. It can trace its origins back to the metallurgy department of the Government School of Mines and Science applied to the Arts, founded in 1851.
Peter David Nellist, is a British physicist and materials scientist, currently a professor in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford. He is noted for pioneering new techniques in high-resolution electron microscopy.