Dudley Robert Herschbach
Herschbach, Dudley Robert (1932-), an American chemist, won the 1986 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his pioneering research on basic chemical reactions. He shared the prize with Taiwan-born American chemist Yuan Tseh Lee and German-born Canadian chemist John Charles Polanyi.
Herschbach was born on June 18, 1932, in San Jose. He grew up on a farm near San Jose. He enjoyed reading and developed an early interest in science and mathematics. He was an outstanding high school football player, but he chose an academic scholarship rather than an athletic scholarship for college. Herschbach earned a bachelor's degree from Stanford University in mathematics in 1954 and a master's degree in chemistry in 1955. He received a doctorate in chemical physics from Harvard University in 1958.
In 1959, Herschbach joined the faculty at the University of California in Berkeley as an assistant professor of chemistry. In 1961, he was appointed associate professor.
While at Berkeley, Herschbach began his work on molecular beams. Using crossed molecular beams, a technique more common in nuclear and particle physics, he fired beams of atoms so that they crossed and a portion of the atoms collided. The energy of the collision caused the atoms to react with one another, to radiate energy, or to behave in other ways without the complications introduced in normal reactions. Molecular-beam reactions were pure —that is, each atom interacted, if at all, with only one other atom. Molecular-beam experiments thus revealed aspects of the structure and behavior of atoms that had been less clear when traditional methods of chemistry were used.
Herschbach conducted his research using a fairly simple apparatus he constructed himself. It heated substances until they became gaseous and then fired beams of the molecules at each other through a vacuum at a 90-degree angle. As the beams collided crosswise, the atoms reacted with one another. The altered molecules landed on a filament of tungsten or platinum through which an electric current flowed. The resulting reaction could then be analyzed by measuring the variation in electric current caused by the altered molecules.
In 1963, Herschbach became professor of chemistry at Harvard, where he continued his experiments with crossed molecular beams. His technique could use only atoms of elements that could be detected by the tungsten or platinum filaments. This problem was addressed with the help of Yuan Lee, who arrived at Harvard in 1967. Lee designed and supervised the construction of a molecular-beam apparatus that used a mass spectrometer in place of the filaments. Lee's apparatus could study a much wider range of atoms.
Lee left for the University of Chicago in 1968 and continued to do research with crossed molecular beams there. Herschbach remained at Harvard and used the technique to study increasingly complex chemical reactions. His later work at Harvard included other experimental and theoretical approaches to the behavior of matter. In 1976, Herschbach was named the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard. He has taught both graduate and undergraduate students.
From 1980 to 1988, Herschbach served as associate editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry.
Herschbach and Lee shared the Nobel Prize with John Polanyi, who had studied similar problems in chemical reactions by measuring the infrared radiation (heat) they emit.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Herschbach has received many awards and honors. He won the Pure Chemistry Prize from the American Chemical Society in 1965, the Spiers Medal from the Faraday Society in 1976, the Pauling Medal from the American Chemical Society in 1978, the Polanyi Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1981, the Langmuir Prize from the American Physical Society in 1983, and both the Kosolapoff Medal and the William Walker Prize in 1994. Herschbach is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.