Bertram Brockhouse, who shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics for his brilliant, pioneering work which laid the foundation for the field of inelastic neutron scattering, died on 13 October 2003 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Bert, as he was known to his colleagues and friends, was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada on 15 July 1918. His family moved to Vancouver when he was 8 and then to Chicago in 1935, by which time he had completed High School. In Chicago he worked as a lab assistant in a small electronic firm, took evening courses, and learned to design, build and repair radios, the latter giving rise to a small business.
The family returned to Vancouver in 1938 and in September 1939 Bert enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy. He spent some time at sea as an antisubmarine sonar operator but mostly serviced sonar equipment at a shore base. After completing a six month course in Electrical Engineering at Nova Scotia Technical College and becoming an Electrical Sub-Lieutenant, he was assigned to the test facilities at the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa, where he met his future wife, Doris (Dorie) Miller.
After his discharge from the navy at the end of the war, he used support from a veteran's program to enrol in a Physics and Mathematics program at the University of British Columbia, receiving his B.A. in 1947. After a summer job at NRC in Ottawa (when he became engaged to Dorie), Bert enrolled in graduate studies in Physics at the University of Toronto, receiving his M.A. in 1948 and his Ph.D. in 1950. His thesis was entitled "The Effect of Stress and Temperature upon the Magnetic Properties of Ferromagnetic Materials". Bert and Dorie were married in 1948.
Near the end of his period at Toronto, Bert accepted an offer to join Donald Hurst's neutron physics group at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories of NRC's Atomic Energy Project (later to become, in 1952, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, AECL), and he moved to Chalk River in 1950.
Don Hurst effectively charged Bert with finding something interesting to do with neutron beams. He certainly did. Over the next dozen years, he played the dominant role in laying the foundation for the field of neutron inelastic scattering or, as he often preferred to call it, neutron spectroscopy, as later recognized by the Nobel Committee.
Soon after arriving at Chalk River, Bert concluded that it might be feasible to measure the energy changes experienced by neutrons scattered by elementary excitations (phonons) using the National Research Experimental (NRX) reactor at Chalk River, then the most powerful research reactor in the world. If so, this would allow the dispersion curves for the phonon excitations to be determined, which in turn would yield information about the forces between atoms in samples ndrepresent a major breakthrough in the fundamental understanding of condensed-matter systems.
Realizing that the signal was going to be very weak, Bert and his scientific and technical collaborators set about developing/inventing techniques and instrumentation, including the improvement of all the components (monochromator crystals, detectors, filters, collimators, shielding, etc.) to make such measurements possible.
Almost from the outset, Bert, always one to keep things simple, decided to employ single-crystal diffraction for neutron energy selection rather than the time-of-flight techniques being pursued by most of his competitors. This path led ultimately to two of his renowned achievements, the Triple-Axis Crystal Spectrometer (TACS) and the method of Constant-Q (constant momentum transfer), which have now been in widespread use for over four decades.
The ultimate recognition of the importance of Bert's work was the award of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Clifford Shull of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cliff having laid the foundation for the field of elastic neutron scattering. There were many other recognitions. Bert received the Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society (1962), the Duddel Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics, U.K. (1963), the Tory Medal of the Royal Society of Canada (1963), the Medal for Achievement in Physics of the Canadian Association of Physicists (1967) and the Centennial Medal of Canada (1967). He was a Fellow of the Royal Societies of Canada and London, a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and a Companion of the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian award. He received Doctor of Science, Honoris Causa, degrees from the University of Waterloo and McMaster University.
At the very end of Bert's period at Chalk River, the second International Atomic Energy Agency's conference on Inelastic Scattering of Neutrons in Solids and Liquids was held at Chalk River Laboratories, 10-14 September 1962. Sixty-seven papers were given at this conference, and there were 64 participants from 13 countries. This represented a large fraction of all those who were, at that time, engaged in or interested in inelastic neutron scattering, and most of them were physicists. Today, well over 10,000 scientists and engineers, from essentially the full spectrum of disciplines, employ neutron scattering techniques to solve their problems, and their numbers are limited by the availability of neutron beams. It is very difficult for a young researcher of today to even imagine the hurdles that Bert and Cliff Shull faced and overcame to give the world neutron scattering, an immensely powerful technique for the study of condensed matter.