Richard George Barnes

Richard George Barnes died in Gainesville FL on August 5, 2013. He was born on December 19, 1922 at Milwaukee WI. He began college at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, but shortly after the start of World War II he enlisted in the US Army and served as a technician on the Manhattan Project’s uranium-enrichment process at Oak Ridge TN. He received his BS in physics from The University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1948, an M.A. from Dartmouth in 1949 and his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1952, under Norman Ramsey. He joined the faculty of the Physics Department of the University of Delaware in 1952 and moved to Iowa State University in 1956 with a joint appointment with the Department of Physics and the Ames Laboratory of the US Atomic Energy Commission, now under the US Department of Energy. He remained at Iowa State till his retirement in 1988, having served as chairman of the department from1971 to 1975. In the first years of his retirement he worked as a program director for the National Science Foundation. He spent 1962-3 as a visiting professor at California Institute of Technology, 1975-76 as a Guest Professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt, holding a Humboldt Senior U.S. Scientist Fellowship, and 1982-83 as a visiting professor at Cornell University.

His research career centered on the study of mostly metallic solids by nuclear magnetic resonance, nuclear quadrupole resonance, electron spin resonance, and Mössbauer spectroscopic techniques. Hydrogen diffusion in metals and their hydrides was a continuing field of study, the former related to hydrogen embrittlement and the latter to hydrogen storage. Structural phase transitions and changes in the electronic structure in these systems were also investigated. His work on metal hydrides, candidates for hydrogen storage, revealed that trace impurities strongly influence hydrogen motion in hydrides, making suspect interpretations of prior NMR studies of hydrogen diffusion in these systems. He also worked on hydrogenated amorphous silicon and fast ionic conductors. This was carried out by Professor Barnes’ research group, which, over the years, produced 25 Ph.D. graduates and 8 M.S. degree recipients. He had collaborators from the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Japan.

He had wide-ranging interests outside of physics. He spoke fluent German, learned in childhood, and Russian, and enjoyed studying several languages, e.g., Japanese, Polish.

He is survived by his wife of almost 63 years, Mildred nee Jachens, four children, Jeffrey Richard, David George, Christina Ellen Heilbrun, and Douglas Allan, seven grandchildren, and two sisters.