Clifford Shull

Clifford Shull
Clifford Shull (right), with Ernest Wollan, working with a double-crystal neutron spectrometer at the ORNL X-10 graphite reactor in 1949
Born	(1915-09-23)September 23, 1915 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Died	March 31, 2001(2001-03-31) (aged 85) Medford, Massachusetts
Nationality	United States
Fields	Physics
Known for	Neutron scattering
Notable awards	Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize (1956) Gregori Aminoff Prize (1993) Nobel Prize in Physics (1994)

Clifford Glenwood Shull (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, September 23, 1915 – March 31, 2001) was a Nobel Prize-winning American physicist.

He attended Schenley High School in Pittsburgh, received BS from Carnegie Institute of Technology and PhD from New York University. He worked for The Texas Company at Beacon, New York during the wartime, followed by a position in the Clinton Laboratory (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), and finally joined MIT in 1955, and retired in 1986.

Clifford G. Shull was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics with Canadian Bertram Brockhouse. The two won the prize for the development of the neutron scattering technique. He also conducted research on condensed matter. Professor Shull's prize was awarded for his pioneering work in neutron scattering, a technique that reveals where atoms are within a material like ricocheting bullets reveal where obstacles are in the dark.

When a beam of neutrons is directed at a given material, the neutrons bounce off, or are scattered by, atoms in the sample being investigated. The neutrons' directions change, depending on the location of the atoms they hit, and a diffraction pattern of the atoms' positions can then be obtained. Understanding where atoms are in a material and how they interact with one another is the key to understanding a material's properties.

"Then we can think of how we can make better window glass, better semiconductors, better microphones. All of these things go back to understanding the basic science behind their operation," Professor Shull, then 79, said on the day of the Nobel announcement. ...

He started [his pioneering work] in 1946 at what is now Oak Ridge National Laboratory. At that time, he said, "Scientists at Oak Ridge were very anxious to find real honest-to-goodness scientific uses for the information and technology that had been developed during the war at Oak Ridge and at other places associated with the wartime Manhattan Project."