Ralph Skomski

Ralph Skomski, world-renowned expert in magnetic materials, American Physical Society fellow, and a research professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, passed away on 10 April 2022.

Born 28 February 1961 in Berlin, Ralph was a dedicated scientist, with a firm grounding in classical and quantum physics, who devoted much of his life to magnetism. He studied polymer physics at the TH Merseburg and obtained his doctorate from the TU Dresden on partially ordered antiferromagnets, working at the Hochschule für Verkerhswesen beside the Hauptbahnhof, where much of the work in Dresden on magnetism was done at the time. He left in 1991 for a postdoc at Trinity College Dublin, throwing himself into permanent magnetism and helping us to understand the gas-phase interstitial modification process developed by Michael Coey’s group for the new rare-earth iron nitride permanent magnets. Ralph participated enthusiastically in the Concerted European Action on Magnets and did the groundwork for the monograph on Permanent Magnetism that was published in 1999.

From Dublin, Ralph went to work for several years with Jürgen Kirschner at the MPI in Halle before taking up a research position in 1998 with Dave Sellmyer’s group at the University of Nebraska, where he remained for the rest of his career.

Ralph was a pencil and paper theorist who delighted in the insights offered by simple models. His 2008 book, Simple Models of Magnetism, epitomized his broad-ranging approach to the whole subject, with many simple figures, sometimes quirky, to convey the ideas. His approach to science was direct and practical.

Ralph’s upbringing in the German Democratic Republic left him with an acute appreciation of European history and politics and an ability to analyze his coworkers’ motivations with penetrating clarity. He was forthright and blunt, both rough and subtle. He participated in magnetism conferences every year, mostly in the US, and he always had something interesting and often topical to report. He did not hesitate to question and correct anyone he thought was mistaken, regardless of the consequences for his career.

He was unable to obtain habilitation in Germany, but in Lincoln he found the perfect scientific partner in Sellmyer. Ralph was the experimentalist’s theorist, and Dave was the theorist’s experimentalist. It was symbiosis for 24 years, a period when joint publications accounted for 60% of each of their outputs. The broad focus was on magnetic nanostructures, for which they will be well remembered. They edited a book together in 2006 (Advanced Magnetic Nanostructures), and Ralph wrote a definitive review on the topic. It is sadly ironic that their long and illustrious careers ended 16 days apart .

Ralph’s most influential contribution was his analysis of how to build the ultimate exchange spring magnet , the “megajoule” magnet that would double the energy product of the best Nd-Fe-B in a two-phase nanocomposite where soft nanoinclusions amount to about half the volume of a coherent, crystallographically aligned hard matrix. Such a magnet could bring a fourfold increase in the efficiency of electrical machines and change the world. It remains a tantalizing prospect and an open challenge.

Ralph was a kind man and an invigorating spirit in applied magnetism with an encyclopedic knowledge of magnetism research, which wrought terror in many of students’ examinations! He is a colleague we can ill afford to do without, whose candor, reliability, straightforwardness, and enthusiasm for science won him respect on four continents.

Ralph, du hattest recht!