Bertram Neville Brockhouse
Brockhouse, Bertram Neville (1918-), a Canadian physicist, developed a method to show how atoms are arranged and how they move. For his groundbreaking work with neutron spectroscopy, Brockhouse shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in physics with American physicist Clifford Glenwood Shull.
Brockhouse was born in Lethbridge, in Alberta, Canada. After completing high school, he operated a radio repair business. During World War II (1939-1945), he served as an electronics technician in the Royal Canadian Navy. When the war ended, he enrolled at the University of British Columbia. He received his B.Sc. degree with honors in 1947. Three years later, he completed his Ph.D. degree at the University of Toronto. Brockhouse and Doris Miller married in 1948. The couple had six children.
Brockhouse began his groundbreaking research in nuclear physics in the 1940's, when the field was still in its early stages. In August 1950, he accepted a job in the neutron physics group at Chalk River, Ontario, which houses Canada's Atomic Energy Project for the National Research Council (now Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.).
At Chalk River, Brockhouse fired beams of neutrons from the nuclear reactor at crystalline materials. The neutrons were scattered by the atoms in the crystals. Brockhouse measured the energy given off by the scattered neutrons. These measurements revealed how the atoms in the crystal were bonded. The method is still widely used to study the structure of crystals.
In 1962, Brockhouse accepted a position as professor of physics at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, from which he retired as professor emeritus in 1984. For his work with neutron spectroscopy, Brockhouse shared the 1994 Nobel Prize for physics with Clifford Shull, who devised a technique known as neutron diffraction to determine where atoms are located. Brockhouse and Shull's findings had far-reaching effects in a number of areas, including high-temperature superconductivity and magnetism.