J. William (Bill) Gadzuk

J. William (Bill) Gadzuk, who made important contributions to theories of surface spectroscopies and surface processes, died on January 8, 2021. Bill was passionate about science and his other pursuits.

Bill was born on March 28, 1941 in Philadelphia and received BS (Mechanical Engineering, 1963), MS (Physics, 1965), and PhD (Physics, 1967) degrees from MIT. He was hired in 1968 by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), later renamed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to provide theoretical support to experimentalists working in the then emerging field of surface science. These experimentalists were working in different parts of the NBS organization but had been holding weekly lunch meetings for four years to discuss new developments in surface science. Bill was not only an important bridge between different NBS groups but an innovator in his own realm.

Soon after his arrival at NBS, Bill began a collaboration with Russell Young and Ward Plummer, an unusually talented postdoc working with Young, who had observed the spectroscopic signature of single adsorbed atoms in the energy distributions of field-emitted electrons from a metallic substrate. Until that time, experimentalists had only observed changes in average properties of a surface area as atoms or molecules were adsorbed. Bill developed the theory for the new Plummer–Young observations. In 1973, Bill and Ward published a comprehensive review of the experiments and theory for the Reviews of Modern Physics, which for both is still their most cited paper.

During the following decades, Bill developed theory for the many new techniques that were being developed to probe the properties of clean surfaces and of atoms and molecules adsorbed on those surfaces. The investigations included angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy, core-level photoelectron spectroscopy, vibrational spectroscopy, stimulated desorption of ions by electron or photon bombardment, electron energy-loss spectroscopy, dynamics and chaos in surface processes, surface interactions at sub-picosecond time scales (femtochemistry), and solid-state tunneling. Bill’s work was recognized by the US Department of Commerce Silver Medal, the Arthur S. Flemming Award (awarded each year to ten Federal employees under the age of 40), and the US Department of Commerce Gold Medal. Bill became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1981 and was named an outstanding referee of the Physical Review journals in 2008. In 1978, Bill was awarded a Guest Professorship by the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Atomic Physics in Copenhagen. That award enabled him to make several visits to the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg for collaborative work. Bill retired in 2006 and became a NIST Scientist Emeritus.

Bill enjoyed many other activities. He was a member of the MIT Alumni Masters Crew and took part in their annual reunion events until knee problems forced him to withdraw. He enjoyed tennis and later swimming as his main form of exercise. Bill appreciated food and fine dining and would occasionally include restaurant reviews as part of his foreign trip reports. For decades, he sang in the local Masterworks Chorus (which later became the National Philharmonic) until health issues prevented him from standing during performances. Bill was a devoted fan of the Washington Capitals hockey team and was triumphant when they won the Stanley Cup. Finally, he was a regular attendee at lunches in the NIST Cafeteria with a group of employees and later retirees who shared wit and wisdom about internal and external politics. Bill continued his lunch interactions until he moved from Washington early in 2020.