Nevill Francis Mott

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nevill Francis Mott and half-covered Werner Heisenberg , 1952 in London.

Sir Nevill Francis Mott (born September 30, 1905 in Leeds , † August 8, 1996 in Milton Keynes ) was an English physicist .

Live and act

His father Charles Francis Mott and his mother Lillian Mary Mott, née Reynolds, were both research students at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge under Joseph John Thomson . His father later became "Director of Education of Liverpool". Nevill Francis Mott went to school at Clifton College in Bristol and studied mathematics and theoretical physics at St John's College, Cambridge .

After three years of research in applied mathematics, Mott received a lectureship at Manchester University in 1929 . In 1930 he returned to Cambridge and became a member (Fellow) and "lecturer" at the local Gonville and Caius College . In 1933 he went to Bristol University as a professor of theoretical physics . After the German annexation of the Czech Republic in March 1939, he and his wife Ruth vouched for the underage Lilly and Ilse Spielmann, daughters of the pianist Leopold Spielmann, who were threatened with persecution in Prague, and took them in until the end of the war. In 1948 Mott became Henry Overton Wills Professor of Physics and head of the Henry Herbert Wills Physical Laboratory in Bristol. In 1954 he followed the appointment as Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge; he held this position until 1971. From 1959 to 1966 he was also a Master of Gonville and Caius College .

He had been married to Ruth Horder since 1930 and had two daughters.

Mott applied new wave mechanics approaches to collisions of atomic particles. The Mott scattering and - based on it - the Mott detector are named after him. His main field of work was solid state physics, the theory of metals and alloys, as well as semiconductors and insulators. Here the Mott isolator and Mott transition are named after him. He and Ronald W. Gurney also wrote a fundamental theoretical work on the photographic process. During the Second World War , he researched the propagation of radio waves and the explosive shattering of bomb covers. In his last years of research he devoted himself to high-temperature superconductivity .

Honors

Mott received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977 together with Philip Warren Anderson and John H. van Vleck “for the fundamental theoretical achievements on the electronic structure in magnetic and disordered systems”.

In 1936 he was elected as a member (" Fellow ") of the Royal Society of London , which awarded him the Hughes Medal in 1941 , the Royal Medal in 1953 and the Copley Medal in 1972 . In 1954 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1957 to the National Academy of Sciences . In 1961 he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . In 1964 he was also elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina - National Academy of Sciences .

The Mott Medal was donated in his honor in 1997 .

Works

  • with Harry Jones : The theory of the properties of metals and alloys , Clarendon Press 1936, 1958
  • together with HSW Massey : The Theory of Atomic Collisions , Clarendon Press 1933, 1949
  • together with EA Davis (editor): Electronic Processes in Non-Crystalline Materials , Oxford University Press 1971, 2012
  • Electronic processes in ionic crystals , 2nd edition, Clarendon Press 1950
  • Metal-Insulator Transitions , Taylor and Francis 1974
  • Conduction in Non-Crystalline Materials , Clarendon Press 1986
  • A life in science , Taylor and Francis, 1986 (An autobiography)
  • Atomic structure and strength of metals: the characteristic properties of metals, their strength and ductility , Vieweg 1961
  • with Ian Sneddon Wave mechanics and its applications , Dover 1963

literature

  • Mott, Alexander S. Alexandrov (Editor): Sir Nevill Mott, 65 years in physics , World Scientific Publishing, 1995
  • Brian Pippard Sir Nevill Francis Mott , Biographical Memoirs Fellows Royal Society, Vol. 44, 1998, p. 315
  • Brian Pippard Nevill Francis Mott , Physics Today, March 1997
  • Edward A. Davis (Ed.): Nevill Mott, Reminiscences and Appreciations , Taylor & Francis, London 1998

swell

Web links

Commons : Nevill Francis Mott  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ RW Gurney, NF Mott, The theory of the photolysis of silver bromide and the photographic latent image, Proc. Roy. Soc. A 164, 1938, pp. 151-167
  2. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 173.
personal data
SURNAME Mott, Nevill Francis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English physicist
DATE OF BIRTH September 30, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Leeds
DATE OF DEATH August 8, 1996
Place of death Milton Keynes