Obituary of Frederick Brown (1924-2011)

Frederick Calvin Brown, a pioneer in the study of the alkali- and silver-halides and the development of synchrotron radiation for the study of solids, passed away peacefully in his sleep on 18 November 2011. At the time of his death he was emeritus professor of physics at the University of Washington, after spending much of his career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Born in Seattle, Washington, on 6 July 1924, Fred received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in physics from Harvard University in 1945, 1946, and 1950, respectively. During World War II, while an undergraduate at Harvard, he worked for the U.S. Navy to help develop radar technology. After receiving his Ph.D, he worked as a physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C. and then at the Applied Physics Laboratory of the University of Washington in Seattle. On 9 August 1952, he married Joan Adele Schauble, also of Seattle, Washington.

Fred’s thesis was titled ‘Nuclear Interaction of Cosmic Rays in a Silver Chloride Crystal’, and the dynamics of electrons in alkali- and silver-halides was to become a career-long interest. In 1952, he became an instructor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he continued research in this area. In 1955, he joined the teaching faculty in the physics department at the UIUC.

The halides are highly resistive materials, and transport measurements were difficult. Fred developed new techniques for studying the mobilities of charge carriers in these materials at different temperatures, exploring traps, scattering by phonons, and the role of defects. Fred had experience making Hall-effect measurements on these materials and recognized that cyclotron resonance could directly measure the effective mass, which was the key to clarify the mechanism of polaron transport. His studies confirmed the Feynman polaron model and were pioneering in establishing the existence of Fröhlich polarons in solids.

Of great interest was the formation of the latent image in silver-halide film emulsions, then the basis of the photographic industry. At March meetings of the American Physical Society in the 1960s, there were informal evening meetings of the ‘Friends of the Silver Halides’, attended mostly by Illinois graduates and scientists from the Eastman Kodak Company. Fred spent many years as a consultant for Kodak and was a prominent figure in the effort to understand the physics of the photographic process.

Fred returned from sabbatical as Fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford, England in 1964 and in 1965 he chaired a subcommittee to the Solid State Panel of The National Academy of Sciences charged with evaluating the utility of synchrotron radiation for research. At the time, the Tantalus storage ring project, intended for the study of the fundamentals of particle accelerators, was underway at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Fred began discussions with Ednor Rowe, the leader of the Tantalus project, about the possibility of using the storage ring as a light source for research. Funding from the Atomic Energy Commission ended before the ring could be completed. Because of the efforts of Fred Brown and his colleagues, funding was obtained from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Tantalus was to become the first storage ring dedicated to the production of synchrotron radiation for scientific research and began operation in 1968. Today Tantalus is known as the progenitor of modern synchrotron-based light source facilities found worldwide.

Fred’s leadership also contributed to the national effort for the establishment in 1973 of the first high-energy synchrotron radiation light source, the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Project (SSRP, now SSRL) at Stanford University. He had a joint appointment with the Xerox PARC General Sciences Lab and with Applied Physics at Stanford. With funds from Xerox, Fred was the first to implement the ‘Grasshopper’ at SSRP in 1974, an ultrahigh vacuum compatible monochromator that opened the previously difficult vacuum ultraviolet/soft x-ray spectral range. This new beamline created an outpouring of absorption and photoemission spectroscopy in research led by Fred as well as other groups over the next decade.

Fred returned to the UIUC in 1975. He developed the Extended-Range Grasshopper (ERG), and his was the first spectroscopy beamline to produce results at the newly commissioned Aladdin storage ring, the successor to Tantalus, in 1985. His work continued on F-centers in ionic solids, angle-resolved photoemission studies of silver halides, and high-temperature superconductors. In 1987, Fred retired from the UIUC. He moved to the University of Washington and worked on a ‘Pacific Northwest’ beamline for the Advanced Photon Source, intended for work on environmental issues. In 1993, he became Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington. During his career he mentored 27 graduate students, wrote a textbook ‘The Physics of Solids’, published in 1967, and authored/coauthored 100 professional journal articles. He received the Humboldt Award while on sabbatical at the University of Kiel, West Germany.

Fred was a pilot and sometimes commuted between Urbana and Madison to work at the storage ring, flying a Piper Cherokee owned by a club at the UIUC. Colleagues remember fondly the adventure of accompanying him on some of these trips in the copilot seat. Fred was an avid outdoorsman and climbed all of the mountains in the Pacific Northwest over 10,000 feet except Glacier Peak. He loved to garden, was an enthusiastic photographer, and collected and repaired clocks and watches.

Up to his retirement and beyond, Fred was a hands-on experimentalist and a superb instrument maker. The excitement and energy he brought to an experiment was astonishing. But he also often worked quietly in the background, seeking career opportunities for his students and younger collaborators. Fred truly enabled others to do science, whether by mentoring, developing new techniques, or leading efforts for groundbreaking facilities—a legacy that continues to have worldwide impact.