Robert Pound | |
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Born | Ridgeway, Ontario, Canada | May 16, 1919
Died | April 12, 2010 90) | (aged
Alma mater | University at Buffalo (BA) |
Known for | Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) Pound–Drever–Hall technique Pound-Rebka experiment |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Physics |
Institutions | Harvard University |
Doctoral students | Glen Rebka Neil S. Sullivan Michio Kaku |
Robert Vivian Pound (May 16, 1919 – April 12, 2010) [1] was a Canadian-American [2] physicist who helped discover nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and who devised the famous Pound–Rebka experiment supporting general relativity. [3] He became a tenured professor of physics at Harvard without ever having received a graduate degree.
Pound was born in Ridgeway, Ontario. [4]
In 1946 Pound and collaborators Edward Purcell and Henry Torrey adapted the Rad Lab techniques—widely used to this day in radar and communications—to detect nuclear magnetic resonance in condensed matter. Soon NMR became a standard analytical tool in chemistry, biology, and physics, and the "Pound box" marginal oscillator became the standard NMR detector. [5]
The discovery of NMR won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1952, [6] though, due to the limitation on the number of recipients and the simultaneous achievements of Felix Bloch's group, only two recipients were designated. In his address to recipient Ed Purcell, Professor Hulthén nevertheless celebrated the "very interesting experiment you performed together with Dr. Pound", [7] making Pound one of only two collaborators explicitly named in the speech. Pound received the National Medal of Science in 1990 for his lifetime contributions to the field of physics. Pound was the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics emeritus at Harvard University. [4] He was a member of the class of 1941 at the University at Buffalo. [4]
Pound's name is also attached to the Pound–Drever–Hall technique used to lock the frequency of a laser on a stable optical cavity.
Felix Bloch was a Swiss-American physicist and Nobel physics laureate who worked mainly in the U.S. He and Edward Mills Purcell were awarded the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for "their development of new ways and methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements." In 1954–1955, he served for one year as the first Director-General of CERN. Felix Bloch made fundamental theoretical contributions to the understanding of ferromagnetism and electron behavior in crystal lattices. He is also considered one of the developers of nuclear magnetic resonance.
Richard Robert Ernst was a Swiss physical chemist and Nobel laureate.
Kurt Wüthrich is a Swiss chemist/biophysicist and Nobel Chemistry laureate, known for developing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods for studying biological macromolecules.
Magnetic resonance is a process by which a physical excitation (resonance) is set up via magnetism.
Paul Christian Lauterbur was an American chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003 with Peter Mansfield for his work which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) possible.
Sir Peter Mansfield was an English physicist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Paul Lauterbur, for discoveries concerning Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Mansfield was a professor at the University of Nottingham.
Edward Mills Purcell was an American physicist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for his independent discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance in liquids and in solids. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) has become widely used to study the molecular structure of pure materials and the composition of mixtures. Friends and colleagues knew him as Ed Purcell.
Nicolaas Bloembergen was a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate, recognized for his work in developing driving principles behind nonlinear optics for laser spectroscopy. During his career, he was a professor at Harvard University and later at the University of Arizona and at Leiden University in 1973.
Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, most commonly known as NMR spectroscopy or magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), is a spectroscopic technique to observe local magnetic fields around atomic nuclei. This spectroscopy is based on the measurement of absorption of electromagnetic radiations in the radio frequency region from roughly 4 to 900 MHz.Absortion of radio waves in the presence of magnetic field is accompanied by a special type of nuclear transition, and for this reason, such type of spectroscopy is known as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy. The sample is placed in a magnetic field and the NMR signal is produced by excitation of the nuclei sample with radio waves into nuclear magnetic resonance, which is detected with sensitive radio receivers. The intramolecular magnetic field around an atom in a molecule changes the resonance frequency, thus giving access to details of the electronic structure of a molecule and its individual functional groups. As the fields are unique or highly characteristic to individual compounds, in modern organic chemistry practice, NMR spectroscopy is the definitive method to identify monomolecular organic compounds.
Hans Georg Dehmelt was a German and American physicist, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989, for co-developing the ion trap technique with Wolfgang Paul, for which they shared one-half of the prize. Their technique was used for high precision measurement of the electron magnetic moment.
Martin Karplus is an Austrian and American theoretical chemist. He is the Director of the Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory, a joint laboratory between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the University of Strasbourg, France. He is also the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry, emeritus at Harvard University. Karplus received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".
Herman Y. Carr, who published as H. Y. Carr, was an American physicist and pioneer of magnetic resonance imaging.
Yevgeny Konstantinovich Zavoisky was a Soviet physicist known for discovery of electron paramagnetic resonance in 1944. He likely observed nuclear magnetic resonance in 1941, well before Felix Bloch and Edward Mills Purcell, but dismissed the results as not reproducible. Zavoisky is also credited with design of luminescence camera for detection of nuclear processes in 1952 and discovery of magneto-acoustic resonance in plasma in 1958.
Sir Paul Terence Callaghan was a New Zealand physicist who, as the founding director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology at Victoria University of Wellington, held the position of Alan MacDiarmid Professor of Physical Sciences and was President of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance.
Herbert Sander Gutowsky was an American chemist who was a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Gutowsky was the first to apply nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods to the field of chemistry. He used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to determine the structure of molecules. His pioneering work developed experimental control of NMR as a scientific instrument, connected experimental observations with theoretical models, and made NMR one of the most effective analytical tools for analysis of molecular structure and dynamics in liquids, solids, and gases, used in chemical and medical research, His work was relevant to the solving of problems in chemistry, biochemistry, and materials science, and has influenced many of the subfields of more recent NMR spectroscopy.
Charles Pence Slichter was an American physicist, best known for his work on nuclear magnetic resonance and superconductivity.
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a physical phenomenon in which nuclei in a strong constant magnetic field are perturbed by a weak oscillating magnetic field and respond by producing an electromagnetic signal with a frequency characteristic of the magnetic field at the nucleus. This process occurs near resonance, when the oscillation frequency matches the intrinsic frequency of the nuclei, which depends on the strength of the static magnetic field, the chemical environment, and the magnetic properties of the isotope involved; in practical applications with static magnetic fields up to ca. 20 tesla, the frequency is similar to VHF and UHF television broadcasts (60–1000 MHz). NMR results from specific magnetic properties of certain atomic nuclei. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is widely used to determine the structure of organic molecules in solution and study molecular physics and crystals as well as non-crystalline materials. NMR is also routinely used in advanced medical imaging techniques, such as in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Jean Louis Charles Jeener is a Belgian physical chemist and physicist, well known for his experimental and theoretical contributions to spin thermodynamics in solids and for his invention of Two-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. He was born in Brussels in 1931, son of Raymond Jeener (biologist) and Hélène Massar. He is married to Françoise Henin.
Myer Bloom, was a Canadian physicist, specializing in the theory and applications of Nuclear magnetic resonance.
Anil Kumar is an Indian experimental physicist known for his work in the field of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. He is a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.