Obituary of Lester Guttman

Lester Guttman, a retired Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and former Editor of the Journal of Applied Physics, died January 4th, 2006, following a fall at his home.

Guttman was born in Minneapolis on April 18, 1919. He received a BS in chemistry from the University of Minnesota in 1940 and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1943, under Kenneth Pitzer with a thesis on the Entropies of Trans-2 Butene and Styrene. He remained a research assistant at Berkeley, publishing papers on the thermodynamic properties of Trans-2-Butene and styrene. However, shortly afterwards, the Manhattan Engineering District required his skills in the Metallurgy Division at Los Alamos, where he worked on sophisticated cryogenics. In 1946, he returned to university research, joining, with Cyril Stanley Smith, the Institute for the Study of Metals (now the James Franck Institute) at the University of Chicago. Here he wrote papers with Smith on the grain structure of metals, as well as papers on superconductivity (with J.W. Stout) and superfluidity (with J. R. Arnold). During this period, Lester’s interests became focused on the connection between short range order and thermodynamic activities in binary solid solutions, comparing measured thermodynamic functions of a system with those calculated from a microscopic model by means of statistical mechanics, a theme that he followed the rest of his career.

In 1955, Lester went to AERE, Harwell, on a Guggenheim Fellowship, where he wrote the review article on Phase Transformations in Metals, published in volume 3 of the Seitz & Turnbull Physics of Solids.

On returning to the US, Guttman joined the General Electric Research Laboratories. There he wrote a review article on The Solid State in Annual Reviews of Physical Chemistry. In 1960, at the age of 41, he joined the Solid State Science Division (later part of the Materials Science division) at Argonne.

Lester’s research at Argonne covered a wide area, both theoretical and experimental, and with a large number of coworkers. He worked on the order-disorder phase transition and in particular on the critical phenomena which occur in a narrow range around the critical temperature. These phenomena he studied both experimentally, mostly by x-ray and neutron scattering, and theoretically, by developing the Ising model. A high point of this activity was reached in 1969 with the publication of two back-to-back Physical Review Letters on the order-disorder transition in Fe3Al. In the 1970s, Lester became interested in amorphous materials, in particular the correlation between their structure and electronic properties. He published several theoretical papers, where the structure of amorphous silicon, hydrogenated amorphous silicon and SiO2 were simulated and compared with neutron scattering results, as well as calculating the effect of static charge on the infrared spectrum. Lester formally retired from Argonne in 1986, but continued to publish until the 1990s.

Lester joined the Editorial Office of the Journal of Applied Physics/Applied Physics Letters as an Associate Editor in 1965, when the office moved to Argonne. He became Editor of the Journal in 1974, holding that position until 1989, but his influence extends to the present day. The spirit introduced by Lester, his consideration for authors and referees, combined with an insistence on high quality remain in force today.

In addition to his scientific and editorial work, Lester Guttman and Betty, his wife of 50 years, had a wide variety of intellectual interests, too long to list. Lester is remembered by us as a good companion, an interesting conversationalist, and one who was always helpful, both with your science and your career. We carry excellent memories of our association.