History
The first neutron diffraction experiments were carried out in 1945 by Ernest O. Wollan using the Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge. He was joined shortly thereafter (June 1946) by Clifford Shull, and together they established the basic principles of the technique, and applied it successfully to many different materials, addressing problems like the structure of ice and the microscopic arrangements of magnetic moments in materials. For this achievement Shull was awarded one half of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics. Wollan had died in the 1990s. (The other half of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Physics went to Bert Brockhouse for development of the inelastic scattering technique at the Chalk River facility of AECL. This also involved the invention of the triple axis spectrometer). The delay between the achieved work (1946) and the Nobel Prize awarded to Brockhouse and Shull (1994) brings them close to the record held by Ernst Ruska between his invention of the electron microscope (1933) - also in the field of particle optics - and his own Nobel prize (1986).
Read more about this topic: Neutron Diffraction
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!
There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)