Nevill Mott
Mott, Nevill (1905-1996), a British physicist, shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on semiconductors. Semiconductors conduct electricity better than insulators like rubber, but not as well as conductors like copper or aluminum. Semiconductors are useful because scientists can control how well they conduct electricity. Such materials have made possible modern computers and other important electronic devices. Mott shared the prize with Americans Philip Warren Anderson and John Hasbrouck Van Vleck.
Nevill Francis Mott was home-schooled by his mother until he was 10. Both his parents had worked at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University under its director Joseph John Thomson, discoverer of the electron. Mott grew up knowing he wanted to be a physicist. After earning bachelor's (1927) and master's (1930) degrees at Cambridge University, he taught and did research there for several years, during which time he discovered the scattering of particles by atoms and nuclei, a phenomenon now called Mott scattering.
In 1933, Mott joined the physics faculty at the University of Bristol, where he became chairman of the department in 1948. Mott's research group at Bristol was a leading force in the development of solid state physics. In 1938, he formulated the first theoretical explanation of how photographic plates work. During World War II (1939–1945), Mott contributed to the British war effort with research on explosives and an analysis of Royal Air Force photographs to investigate the performance of German V-2 rocket-bombs.
Mott co-wrote The Theory of Atomic Collisions (1933), The Theory of the Properties of Metals and Alloys (1936), and Electronic Processes in Ionic Crystals (1940). In 1954, he became Cavendish professor of experimental physics at the University of Cambridge.
During the mid-1960's, Mott became interested in noncrystalline, or amorphous, semiconductors, whose atoms are not arranged in regular arrays. Since glassy semiconductors are simpler and cheaper to produce than crystalline ones, they led to more affordable electronic devices.
Mott was knighted in 1962.