Gunther Klaus Wertheim

In Memoriam Gunther K. Wertheim

Gunther Klaus Wertheim passed away unexpectedly on July 14 at the age of 87 at his home in Morristown, New Jersey, USA. A Fellow of the APS, he was analyzing synchrotron radiation photoemission data and writing publishable papers right up to the end of his life. Recently he was notified of acceptance of a paper in Applied Physics Letters. He remained as throughout his 40+ years at Bell Labs – a strong leader in fields of spectroscopy applied to a collection of problems in a wide range of disciplines such as magnetism, materials science, chemistry, biology and surfaces.

Gunther Wertheim showed early promise as a school boy with chemistry in the kitchen, and he published his very first paper – notably in geophysics - as a student in 1954 (Studies of the electrical potential between Key West, Florida, and Havana, Cuba). This work was based on undergraduate research he had done at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts under the tutelage of two eminent oceanographers (Arnold B. Arons and Henry Stommel).

In 1955, he joined the staff of Bell Laboratories, where he first worked in semiconductor physics and then magnetism. As a young scientist at Bell Labs Gunther recognized the great potential in Mossbauer spectroscopy, a new phenomenon at the time, discovered in 1958. He immediately understood the great potential of this new tool for applications in physics and chemistry as well as in magnetism and materials science. He began - less than two years later - to publish his own novel and trend-setting results. By 1964 he had already published one of the very early and very influential books on Mössbauer spectroscopy (Mössbauer Effect: Principles and Applications, Academic Press, New York). Many of the leading Mössbauer researchers in the USA became associated with his group at Bell Labs, where he soon advanced to department head.

Gunther Wertheim was born in Berlin-Tempelhof in 1927 as the son of a physician. Due to the rampant Nazi terror, he and his father had to leave their home country in 1939 on one of the last ships to leave before war started. He completed his high school education in New York City in 1944 at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School. In the same year, he enlisted in the US army – where his intellect was quickly recognized; he was taught Japanese in the Army but never used it since the War ended. At the end of the war he entered the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, and graduated in 1951 with an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering. Harvard University accepted him for graduate studies in physics, where he joined the group of the well-known physicist Robert V. Pound. Gunther received his PhD in 1955 with a thesis in low-energy nuclear physics.

In 1970, when X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) had emerged as a new tool for chemical analysis (ESCA), he abruptly changed to this field and applied this new method to solid state physics solving such problems as mixed-valence semiconductor to metal transitions. His XPS lab soon emerged as one of the leading centers for photoelectron spectroscopy in the USA and abroad, where many postdocs and guest scientists from all over the world learned and practiced the new spectroscopy at its scientific frontier. Gunther was an extremely accurate and masterful interpreter of scientific data, and he used computers as soon as they became available, nearly always with programs that he had written by himself. He mastered numerous different versions of his programs on multiple operating systems and computers that he made accessible to his co-authors. He was the author of more than 330 peer- reviewed scientific papers; most of them were very highly cited. He mentored several women students who are now tenured full professors, including Shirley Chiang at the UC-Davis physics department and Stephanie DiCenzo at Colorado College.

Gunther’s wife, Lee, passed away in 1995. In the same year he decided to retire from Bell Labs. His Bell colleagues held him in high esteem and organized a special Symposium in his honor. Scientists from many far-flung institutions attended, including George Watkins (Lehigh University), Paul Richards (UC-Berkeley), Robert Haddon (CU-Riverside) and Stefan Hüfner from Saarbrucken. Hüfner had been among those who had learned XPS from Gunther some 22 years earlier.

Upon retirement, Gunther continued to collaborate with Jack Rowe and others on photoemission employing synchrotron radiation. Even his “part time” contributions added significantly to the science in this field. And less than two years after retirement and a “reduced role”, he published papers in Physical Review B and other journals, in collaboration with scientists from Rutgers, NC State, South Korea, and Taiwan. His contributions continued to his death.

A wide range of physicists around the world who will miss him recognize well his pioneering work, and his Bell Labs colleagues will especially miss his insights and thoughtful technical discussions that they had with him throughout his scientific life.

Jack Rowe, North Caroline State University
Leonard Feldman, Rutgers University
Louis Lanzerotti, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Walter Brown, Lehigh University