Brendan Scaife

Brendan Kevin Patrick Scaife FTCD, MRIA, Boyle Laureate (/skeɪf/; born 19 May 1928) is an Irish academic engineer and physicist who carried out pioneering work on the theory of dielectrics. He founded the Dielectrics Group in Trinity College Dublin where he is Fellow Emeritus and formerly Professor of electromagnetism and of Engineering Science. Scaife showed that in a linear system the decay function is directly proportional to the function of the corresponding fluctuating macroscopic variable, and proved how the spectral density of the dipole moment fluctuations of a dielectric body could be calculated from the frequency dependence of the complex permittivity, ε (ω) = ε'(ω) – iε"(ω). It was independent of Ryogo Kubo who in 1957 developed the corresponding theory for magnetic materials. The work was published prior to the work of Robert Cole in 1965 which is often cited.

Brendan Scaife was born in London on 19 May 1928 and just after World War II he began his undergraduate studies in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Queen Mary College, University of London; he graduated in 1949. At Queen Mary College there was a high-voltage laboratory run by Hans Tropper, whose lectures on electromagnetic theory inspired Scaife. After graduation, he began research into the properties of insulating materials under Tropper's direction. Scaife's doctoral research broke new ground in the study of dielectrics.

Brendan Scaife was the first scientist to successfully measure the complex permittivity of a number of polar liquids such as eugenol, glycerol and water as a function of pressure up to 12 kbar. This is published in a research note in Proc. Phys. Soc. B, 68 (1955) 790. Up to that time, Chan and Danforth working in Bridgman's laboratory in the USA, had measured essentially the equilibrium relative permittivity ε(ω) of a number of liquids. At the time the experimental facilities in this area of research were severely limited. Commercial bridges for measuring complex permittivity were not available. A three terminal transformer coupled ratio arm bridge based on Blumlein's invention prior to the War had been constructed at Queen Mary by an Indian student S. Sharan for his PhD work. This bridge was applied successfully to measurements of samples subjected to high pressures. After completing this work and a brief period of employment with GEC in Wembley, he returned with his Irish parents to Ireland where he remained for the rest of his career in spite of many offers from abroad.

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