Obituary of Bernard Cooper (1936-2013)

Bernard (Barry) R. Cooper, Claude W. Benedum professor emeritus at West Virginia University, passed away at age 77 on June 10, 2013 in Morgantown, West Virginia. A fellow of the American Physical Society, Barry was a theoretical condensed matter physicist best known for his contributions to the fundamental understanding of the magnetic and electronic properties of transition, rare earth, and actinide metals. He also contributed to early efforts to accurately calculate and predict the properties of materials using first-principles methods.

Bernard R. Cooper

Barry was born on April 15, 1936 in Everett, Massachusetts. He received his S.B. degree in Physics from MIT in 1957 and his Ph.D. from the University of California – Berkeley in 1961 where we worked with Charles Kittel. After completing his Ph.D., he held positions at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, England, Harvard University, and the General Electric Research Laboratory. During this time his research focused on the magnetic properties of transition and rare earth metals. While at GE he developed a band parameterization scheme using a Green’s function method that allowed an efficient calculation of band structures of transition metals. He also developed models that explain the unusual magnetic behavior of antiferromagnets, many of them containing cerium, that have strong magnetic anisotropies (i.e. comparable to the exchange energy).

In 1974 he left General Electric to become the Claude W. Benedum Professor of Physics at West Virginia University. At WVU his research focused on magnetic ordering and associated properties of correlated electron systems as well as the thermo-mechanical properties, phase separation, and interfacial behavior of structural and magnetic metallic systems. Together with investigators at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in particular John Willis, Barry studied the electronic properties of actinides using ab-initio techniques, specifically working with a full-potential linear muffin-tin orbital method (FPLMTO) that takes into account relativistic effects. One of his major contributions in this field was the development of a band and model Hamiltonian theory for weakly hybridizing f-electron systems based on the FPLMTO. This technique has since been used by others in a wide array of ab-initio calculations involving transition metals, rare-earth metals, and actinides where relativistic effects, including spin-orbit coupling, are important.

In collaboration with Willis and other scientists at Los Alamos, he also worked on plutonium, where he was able to calculate its surface electronic structure and explain experimental photoemission data in terms of delta-like surface states. In the field of intermetallic compounds, he developed techniques for calculating bonding energies of carbide-based systems in collaboration with David Price, who later worked at Memphis State University (now University of Memphis). At WVU during the late 1990’s and early 2000’s he also made contributions to the study of wide-bandgap semiconductors, devising algorithms to determine the role of various types of defects in GaN.

He collaborated closely with Nancy Giles, Larry Halliburton, and Thomas Myers on this project. While at WVU Barry was a champion of the research mission of the University. He initiated and organized (with Gabor Fodor of the WVU Chemistry Department) the Benedum Public Lecture series, the yearly Lakeview Conference on Computational Materials, and played a key role in the early years (1980’s and 1990’s) of the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program at WVU.

He was also a mentor to numerous post-doctoral researchers, students, and junior faculty at WVU. Barry was deeply concerned with issues related to social justice and freedom in the world. During the 1970’s and 1980’s he was an advocate for refusnik scientists from the Soviet Union and for human rights in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. In an article in Technology Review, written in 1980 with Earl Callen and John Parmentola, he argued that scientists and human rights issues are inextricably linked to each other. He was a member of the executive board of the Committee of Concerned Scientists and chairman of the Committee on International Freedom of Scientists of the American Physical Society. Barry retired in 2003 when his health started deteriorating. Despite this, he continued to collaborate with Ning Ma and Bruce Kang (from the WVU Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department) for several years to successfully model the electronic behavior of intermetallic alloys, and co-authored several journal papers between 2003 and 2008.

He was interested in science until the end. As a junior faculty in the WVU Physics Department I had the privilege of working with Barry on several projects. He was a kind and supportive mentor to me. I will miss his intelligence, sense of humor, and most of all his genuine concern for the well-being of myself and the other faculty members, students, staff, and postdocs and their families at WVU.