Obituary of Samuel C. Fain

The international physics community lost a prominent researcher, and many of its members mourned a dear friend, when after a long illness Sam Fain passed away on May 26, 2009. He was 66 years old. Born and raised in Tennessee, Sam attended Reed College in Portland Oregon where in 1965 he received his BS degree and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He pursued graduate studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and earned his PhD in Physics four years later. While still a student, he sought, and was offered, an Assistant Professorship in our Department. Sam deferred his arrival until 1970 so that he could spend a year at the University of Amsterdam on a NATO fellowship.

His professional interests were directed towards surface science, nanotechnology, and the teaching of experimental physics. He was passionate about creating and maintaining a laboratory with superb instrumentation in order to obtain a thorough understanding of the subject which had stirred his interest. As an Assistant Professor, he designed and built one of the world’s first low energy electron diffraction (LEED), variable temperature, spectrometers. With it, he and his students explored the structure and phases of the first layer of atoms or molecules deposited on the surface of graphite. They were the first to provide direct experimental evidence that a two-dimensional crystal of adsorbate with a lattice constant incommensurate with that of the periodic substrate upon which it is adsorbed would orient itself with its principal axes at a non-zero angle with those of the substrate. This effect had been predicted less than a year earlier by Anthony Novaco and John McTague. His group examined the orientational ordering of molecular nitrogen adsorbed on graphite, a transition analogous to that of Heisenberg spins aligning along the principle axes of a cube. They found it to be consistent with a first-order one as had been predicted on theoretical grounds. Such experiments were then, and remain still, the standard in the field. When scanning tunneling microscopy was first developed, Sam and his students switched their field of research to the topography of solid surfaces and the phenomena of surface melting in ice. Tunneling and atomic force microscopy were employed wherever appropriate. Before such microscopes were commercially available, they built their own. He was recognized by the award of an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship (1971-75) and election to Fellowship in the American Physical Society (1984).

Sam contributed in large measure to the teaching mission of our Department, making substantial improvements to all laboratory courses, from introductory to senior-level ones. In particular, his passion for photography and optics was reflected in his very successful Optics Laboratory course. He guided fifteen graduate students to the completion of their PhD dissertations, and advised and directed a large number of undergraduate and graduate students who wanted to work with him. He was one of the founders of the UW Center for Nanotechnology.

Sam’s interests were broad. Many of us saw the moons of Jupiter and other celestial objects for the first time through his telescope, which he would carry to outings with friends and students. In late August, his sacks of small, home-grown, golden tomatoes that he shared with us made our lunches with him more eagerly anticipated.

He was an unassuming person, an example that science and faith, joy and sadness, can and often must, be contained within the same breast. We will all miss him.