Richard A. Webb
Richard Alan Webb passed away last year at the age of sixty-nine. For those of us who worked with him over the years, his untimely passing was a tremendous shock. In the last four decades, Richard Webb made pioneering contributions to the study of electromagnetic properties of materials at low temperatures and the creation of the field of “mesoscopic physics”. He will be sorely missed.
Webb was born in Los Angeles, CA on September 10, 1946. He received his BA degree from UC Berkeley (1968) and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UC San Diego (1970, 1973). He worked with Professor John Wheatley on some of the most exciting topics of the day including noise thermometry at millikelvin temperatures, advancements in the techniques of dilution refrigeration, development of RF-SQUIDs, and seminal experiments on the properties of superfluid 3He. During his years of postdoctoral work at UC San Diego and as a staff member at Argonne National Laboratory, he developed methods for SQUID-based NMR and studied the magnetic response of superfluid 3He and other materials.
Webb joined the Physical Sciences Department at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York as a Research Staff Member in 1978. He started an investigation of quantum tunneling in 1 µm Niobium Josephson junctions. In addition to the careful characterization of noise in these samples, he and Richard Voss demonstrated the first clear evidence for macroscopic quantum tunneling of the junction phase. Around this time, the condensed matter physics world was taken over by the excitement about quantum coherence in ‘mesoscopic’ systems, i.e., structures with spatial dimensions that are comparable to fundamental physical length scales for the electrons in the materials, such as the inelastic scattering length, normal metal coherence length or the Fermi wavelength. Webb and his collaborators performed a wide range of experiments that spanned from insulating to highly conductive devices in this size range. The fabrication of these samples was extremely delicate and the measurements required extraordinary attention to detail. The main surprises revealed in the experiments were unexpectedly large conductance fluctuations in dirty metals caused by coherent interference of the charge carriers. Of particular note were the observations of Aharonov-Bohm oscillations in normal metal rings and of persistent currents in isolated normal metal rings. It is fair to say that these experiments paved the way for the currently hot area of nanophysics.
In 1993 Webb became the Alford Ward Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, where he continued to study quantum coherence effects in mesoscopic systems and spin relaxation in lateral spin valves. In 2004 he became the John M. Palms Bicentennial Professor of Physics at the University of South Carolina. At USC he continued his studies of mesoscopic systems investigating nanoscale electric, mechanical and magnetic properties of spin valves, nanowires and graphene.
During his tenure at IBM, Webb received three different Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards for his various achievements. In 1989 he received Simon Memorial Prize from the Institute of Physics for the studies of mesoscopic systems. In 1992 he won the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize from the American Institute of Physics “for his discovery of universal conductance fluctuations and the h/e Aharonov-Bohm effect in small disordered metallic conductors, and his leadership role in elucidating the physics of mesoscopic systems”. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1996.
In addition to being an outstanding scientist, Webb was an excellent manager at IBM Research, a dedicated teacher and a caring advisor during his university tenures. It was not uncommon to see him in the lab on weekends and holidays monitoring his experiments. Even though he passionately expressed his opinions on the prevailing theories and experiments of the day, he was careful to avoid imposing his own views on his employees or his students. He always made constructive suggestions to improve their technical contributions and protected them from unnecessary processes and distractions.
After a long battle with illness, where he exceeded his physicians’ predictions about recovery more than once, he died on January 23, 2016. In spite of his severe illness, Webb remained diligently at work in the classroom and his lab up until the last week of his life. Richard Webb is survived by his wife Lisa Levine, his two sons, Alan and Bryan, and his dog Chaos.
