Allan Roy Mackintosh

Allan Roy Mackintosh (born January 22, 1936 in Nottingham , † December 20, 1995 ) was a British physicist . He mainly worked in the field of solid state physics and spent most of his research time in Denmark .

Life

Allan Roy Mackintosh was born on January 22, 1936 in Nottingham to Malcom Roy and Alice Mackintosh (née Williams). He had an older brother, Ian Malcom Mackintosh, born in 1927. His family came from the working class. He attended Nottingham High School.

Mackintosh studied at the Peterhouse of Cambridge University . His doctoral thesis "Experimental study of the Fermi surface of lead" (Experimental investigation of the Fermi surface of lead he took) at the Cavendish Laboratory at Brian Pippard by and received the Ph.D. in 1960. In Cambridge he met his future wife Jette from Denmark.

In 1960 Mackintosh became an associate professor at Iowa State University . In 1963 he worked for the first time at the Danish Atomic Energy Research Center Risø . In 1966 he went to Denmark permanently and became a professor at the DTU in Lyngby , in 1970 he moved to the University of Copenhagen . In 1971 he was appointed director of the Risø Laboratory, and from 1976 researched and taught again in Copenhagen.

From 1976 to 1979 he was President of the Danish Physical Society, from 1980 to 1982 of the European Physical Society and from 1986 to 1989 Director of NORDITA ( Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics ).

In 1980 Mackintosh was made an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University. In 1986 he won the Spedding Prize together with Hans Bjerrum Møller , and in 1991 he was accepted into the Royal Society . He was also a Knight of the Dannebrog Order , a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences, the Royal Norwegian Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society .

In addition to his research and teaching activities, Mackintosh was an active figure in Danish science policy and public atomic energy debate as well as in European research cooperation.

On December 20, 1995, Mackintosh died in a car accident in Denmark.

plant

In Iowa, Mackintosh, together with Dan Gustafson , began to work on the atomic properties of the rare earth metals and experimentally refuted the so-called promotional model . In 1963 he used in Risø a neutron - spectrometer for the study of spin waves in rare earth elements. Later he also worked primarily on the magnetism of rare earths. Together with Jens Jensen he wrote the standard work Rare Earth Magnetism . He always emphasized the importance of the fermi surfaces for understanding the structure of metals.

In the last years of his life, Mackintosh also studied the history of science . He examined about the relationship between Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr and published work on the works of John Vincent Atanasoff and Charles Ellis .

Web links

• Magnetism in Metals , symposium in memory of Mackintosh, with biographical information
• Allan Roy Mackintosh , JSTOR: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society