Neville Smith, scientific director for the Advanced Light Source of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a leading authority in the field of photoemission spectroscopy, died on August 18, 2006, at age 64, unexpectedly of cancer. A native of England with a PhD in physics from Cambridge University, he moved to the US in 1966. After post-doctoral research at Stanford University under photoemission spectroscopy pioneer William Spicer, he joined the staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and continued the study of the electronic structure of solids and surfaces for 25 years. In 1991, Dr Smith was awarded the prestigious Davisson-Germer Prize of the American Physical Society for his contributions to the development of momentum-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. In 1994, he was named as the first scientific program head of the Advanced Light Source (ALS). Under his leadership, the ALS scientific program thrived. "It is not the number of warm bodies on the floor but the quality of science produced that is the true measure of a user facility's success," Dr. Smith once said. During his tenure as scientific director, the number of scientific users of the ALS grew from a few hundred to several thousand. There will be no funeral, but a memorial service to celebrate Smith's life will be held in the fall.
The following awards were presented during the plenary session of the 55th Annual Denver X-Ray Conference:
The 2006 Birks Award: Peter Wobrauschek, Atominstitut, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria.
The 2006 Jerome B. Cohen Student Award (two recipients): Hanfei Yan, Columbia University, New York, NY, and Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL won the award for his work "Dynamical Artifacts in X-ray Diffraction from Single Crystals"; Wanchuck Woo, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN won the award for his work "In-Situ Time-Resolved Neutron Diffraction Measurement of Transient Material States during a Thermo-Mechanical Process Based on Quasi-Steady State Principle".
The 2006 Hanawalt Award: Peter Wallace, Dos Arroyos Enterprises, Oro Valley, AZ.
Scientists at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) led by Dr W. Utsumi have proved that the formation of bulk metallic glass of elemental Zr and Ti, which was recently reported (see for example, Zhang and Zhao, Nature 430, 332 (2004) and Y. Wang et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 155501 (2005)) was some sort of phantom. The experiment basically took the form of X-ray diffraction in high-temperature and high-pressure conditions, but in addition to the normal energy-dispersive detector, the research group employed an in situ angular-dispersive X-ray diffractometer equipped with a 2D detector and X-ray transparent anvils. The disappearance of all the Bragg peaks in the one-dimensional energy-dispersive data could be taken as evidence of amorphization. However, the research group found several intense Bragg spots in their angular-dispersive data, even in the exact same conditions where amorphization was reported. This indicates that Zr and Ti do not form glass, but that the grains grow rapidly. The experiments were carried out at BL14B1 and BL22XU, SPring-8, Japan. For more information, see the paper, "Does Bulk Metallic Glass of Elemental Zr and Ti Exist?", T. Hattori et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 96, 255504 (2006).
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