Obituary of Gilbert Jerome Perlow

Gilbert Perlow, one of the pioneers of the Mössbauer effect and an editor of the Journal of Applied Physics and Applied Physics Letters died on February 17 2007, a week after his 91st birthday.

He was born in New York City on February 10 1916. He attended Townsend Harris Hall (now Townsend Harris High School) in Queens, where he had a science teacher who realized that he had a pupil who could make apparatus work and who had the intellectual curiosity to try to understand how the world works. The teacher gave him the freedom to study what he wanted, and in return had the benefit of a skilled helper to assist with his classes.

Gil went to Cornell in 1932 as an undergraduate at age 16 to study medicine, as his parents saw this as a good career during the Depression. But so strong was his interest in physics (and, as he said, his talent for medicine was not so great) that he switched. He went on to graduate work at Cornell, and his Masters thesis was on measurements of L satellite x-rays was supervised by F. K. Richtmyer. He then moved to the University of Chicago and did his Ph.D. thesis research with S. K. Allison on nuclear reactions of 6Li using a Van de Graaf accelerator. For assistance with making a lithium target he consulted a chemist, Mina Rea Jones, who became his wife as well as scientific partner until she died in 2003.

Gil’s Ph. D. thesis was completed in 1940. With America’s involvement in World War II approaching, he left Chicago for the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, where he worked on submarine detection using ultrasound. The system he built was so successful, that he was flown to Pearl Harbor to supervise its installation in a submarine. He was offered a berth on a trial voyage to sail through the Tsugaro Straights between the two large islands of Japan, but he declined it. After the war he turned to cosmic ray measurements in the upper atmosphere using captured German V2 rockets. He designed and built several detector systems that were launched from White Sands, New Mexico. These included telescope arrays of Geiger counters and cloud chambers. The results showed the presence of y-rays as well as charged particles above the atmosphere. Only a small fraction of the y-rays was in the primary cosmic radiation and he proposed that most of them arise from Compton back-scattering from the atmosphere below.

In 1952 Gil joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota and in 1954 he moved to Argonne National Laboratory where, apart from sabbaticals at Harwell and Munich (where he was the recipient of a Humboldt Fellowship), he spent the rest of his career. In the 1950-s he designed a neutron recoil spectrometer and, with Andrew Stehney characterized delayed neutron emitters.

Following the discovery of the Mössbauer Effect in 1958, and the discovery of the large effect in 57Fe, he worked with Stan Hanna and a quickly assembled group of collaborators to unravel the hyperfine spectrum of 57Fe. This was achieved from Gil’s realization that the y-ray polarization could be detected and used to simplify the spectrum. Measurements of the change in the spectrum when a magnetic field was applied, showed that the hyperfine field was negative, i.e. anti-parallel to the atomic magnetic moment. There followed a long series of measurements on applications of the Mössbauer Effect to lesser used isotopes, and he was the first to employ it to explore the just-discovered (by John Malm at Argonne) compounds of xenon. In the preparation of xenon and other compounds his wife, Mina Rea, was of indispensable assistance. Gil also used the Mössbauer Effect to study phenomena such as quantum beats, and explored the magnetic hyperfine anomaly in 191Ir.

Gil had always believed in the importance of looking for applications of research and in communicating and disseminating the results of research (and indeed held a patent for using the Mössbauer Effect to measure y-ray polarization). He became Editor of both the Journal of Applied Physics and Applied Physics Letters in 1970. He retired from the Physics Division at Argonne in 1981, but remained an important influence in the AIP’s physics journals office at Argonne until he finally retired in 1990. He was an inventive editor, and instituted a high-Tc panel when these materials were discovered, assuring rapid publication and APL’s share in this exploding field. Following the example of Reviews of Modern Physics he established Applied Physics Reviews. He wrote many of the form letters still used and his ad hoc correspondence was a delight to read. His constant support was highly appreciated by his successors.

A witty and cultured man, he enjoyed reading, sketching, listening to music and sailing his yacht on Lake Michigan. He served as Commodore of the Chicago Corinthian Yacht Club.

Gil Perlow will be remembered for his feeling for important experiments and his ingenuity in carrying them out. Many scientists from the US and abroad came to work with and learn from him. They and many friends throughout the world will miss the friendship and hospitality extended by the Perlows over the years.