Rufus Ritchie

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Rufus Haynes Ritchie (born September 24, 1924 in Blue Diamond , Kentucky - † July 28, 2017 or July 29, 2017 ) was an American solid-state physicist.

Ritchie graduated from the University of Kentucky with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1947. He served as a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps during World War II and was on military science training courses at Kenyon College, Yale Communications Cadet School, and Harvard University during that time Michigan Institute of Technology. From 1949 he was in the Health Physics department of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory , where radiation damage was examined. In 1959 he received his doctorate from the University of Tennessee with Richard D. Present. He was a professor at the University of Tennessee alongside his work at Oak Ridge (where he was the laboratory's Corporate Fellow).

He is known for his discovery of the surface plasmon (1957). This happened during theoretical investigations on the energy loss of fast electrons in thin metal films under Robert Birkhoff. The prediction of the surface plasmons was met with disbelief and opposition, but he received support from Birkhoff and others in the Oak Ridge Laboratory and from David Pines so that he could publish it in 1957. Three years later, this was confirmed by electron scattering experiments at the National Bureau of Standards. From the end of the 1990s it found major applications in nanoplasmonics and nanophotonics. With the surface plasmon polariton , light can be manipulated on the nanoscale far below its diffraction limit.

He was also one of the founders of modern radiation dosimetry, for example in the dosimetry of fast neutrons. This work was essential to the Ichiban's program of medical screening of survivors of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bombings. He was a leading expert on the interaction of charged particles with solids and surfaces with contributions, among other things, to the Barkas effect (difference between particles and their antiparticles with respect to the deceleration in matter), to the theory of charged states in solids and the theory of electronic wakes (spatial and temporal fluctuations around fast ions in solids or near surfaces). He developed the first non-perturbation theory of the interaction of slow ions with matter and a theory of the dielectric of quantum plasmas.

He was an honorary doctorate from the University of the Basque Country, received the Jesse W. Beams Award in 1984 , was visiting professor in Aarhus and Odense and was a visiting fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge University and the Cavendish Laboratory. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Tennessee.

He was married to Dorothy Estes since 1955, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ritchie, Plasma losses by fast electrons in thin films, Phys. Rev., Volume 106, 1957, pp. 874-881
  2. ^ Obituary in Physics Today, Volume 71, 2018, No. 4
personal data
SURNAME Ritchie, Rufus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ritchie, Rufus Haynes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH September 24, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Blue Diamond , Kentucky
DATE OF DEATH July 28, 2017 or July 29, 2017