Robert Meservey

Cambridge, MA, US Robert Meservey, co-discoverer of spin-dependent tunneling and winner of the Oliver E. Buckley Prize, died on June 18, 2013 in Cambridge Massachusetts at the age of 92.

During his multifaceted life, he was by turns a champion skier, decorated soldier, successful professional photographer, and insightful physicist.

His physics interests ranged from optics to superfluid helium and flux quantization in superconductors to such disparate subjects as plate tectonics and time-variation of fundamental constants, but his most impactful work involved the experimental discovery that the current flowing in tunnel junctions could be separated into spin-up and spin-down parts. This discovery and subsequent experiments have led to a burgeoning field of study of spin effects in conductors and blossoming developments in electronic applications.

He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Having started a low temperature and thin films group at the newly created Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory (MIT) in the early sixties, Bob continued there as a leader into the nineteen nineties.

The discovery of electron spin-polarized tunneling in 1970, with one of us (Tedrow) demonstrated that the quasipartical density of states in a superconductor was split in energy by a magnetic field, providing a way to obtain a pure tunnel current of either spin direction to probe the spin density of states of other metals near the Fermi energy. It allowed for the measurement of the degree of spin polarization of conduction electrons in ferromagnetic metals, study the effect of spin-orbit scattering in superconductors and the investigation of other theoretical predictions involving electron spin. This discovery since then known as the Meservey-Tedrow technique has been widely exploited worldwide.

In 1995, Meservey teamed with the other author (Moodera) in the discovery of large magneto-resistance in ferromagnetic-ferromagnetic tunnel junctions at room temperature, a breakthrough which has enabled the development of the current generation of computers with extreme high density drives and nonvolatile magnetic memory/logic devices, one of the most dynamic fields in physics today.

Robert Hilton Meservey was born on April 1, 1921 in Hanover, New Hampshire, the son of a physicist, Dartmouth College physics professor Arthur B. Meservey. Growing up in Hanover and attending Dartmouth gave him the opportunity to fully develop his talent for skiing, and he became national champion in both alpine and Nordic events. Upon graduation from Dartmouth in 1943, he volunteered for the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, which emphasized skiing, mountain climbing, and cold-weather survival. He was awarded the Soldier’s Medal for a lifesaving response to a training mishap and was sent to Officer Candidate School, missing being sent to Italy when the 10th deployed there.

He was involved with developing night-vision equipment for the Pacific Theater until the end of the war. Following the arrival of peace, Bob became a professional photographer, capitalizing on his knowledge of optics. He made highly-regarded photo studies of the architecture of Newport, Rhode Island, New York City, and Aspen, Colorado. His photograph of the debutante Jacqueline Bouvier appeared on several magazine covers when John Kennedy became president.

During the Korean War, Bob studied physics and math at George Washington University while working on night-vision equipment at the Army Engineering Laboratory. One of his instructors at George Washington was George Gamow. In 1955, he entered Yale University graduate school and worked in the renowned low temperature physics group under the iconic C. T. Lane. His thesis project was to observe vortices in rotating superfluid helium using optical techniques.

After receiving his Ph. D. from Yale, he began working in the low-temperature group at Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he co-authored an important early paper on superconducting tunneling with David Douglass. He then moved to the Magnet Laboratory on the MIT campus where he worked for the remainder of his career.

An inspirational leader with insatiable curiosity even into his nineties, Dr. Meservey was always ready to offer help and insight to anyone who sought his advice. He mentored a number of graduate students and post-docs from Boston-area schools. Bob was always eager to talk to theorists about the groups experimental results.

Prof. Peter Fulde, Max Planck Institute, Germany, an earlier theoretical associate, called him a classical scholar, - an outstanding scientist with broad scientific interest. Prof. Patrick Lee of MIT, adds “Bob was as humble about his remarkable achievements in physics as he was with his other accomplishments, all part of a life well lived. " Bob was a brilliant scientist, but also a shining example for future generations, combining caring generosity with an extraordinarily productive career.

Jagadeesh S. Moodera and Paul M. Tedrow