Roger Peverley

The physics community was deprived of a highly inventive and most congenial colleague with the death after a brief illness of J Roger Peverley on February 6, 2016. He was pre-deceased by his partner Hien Nguyen four months earlier who died of a sudden heart attack in Roger’s presence. Roger made original contributions to the determination of the structure of the Fermi surface in metals and its effect on electric conduction using a non-local generalization of the venerable Ohm’s Law. He was as skilled in experiment as he was in theory and might express mild surprise when colleagues sought to make a distinction between these competencies. Roger was reticent but not humble. He was well aware of his ability and value and trusted others to share this perception.

J Roger Peverley was born in Derby, England in 1938. He attended Christ’s College, Cambridge where he distinguished himself as an undergraduate, winning college prizes during each of his undergraduate years and graduating in 1960 with first class honors, an eminent enough achievement at that distinguished institution. Subsequently, he graduated to MA and later he was awarded a PhD for his work on Fermi surfaces at the Cavendish Laboratory under the tutelage of Brian Pippard, FRS. Brian Josephson, discoverer of the eponymous superconductor/conductor property, was a colleague in the Cavendish at that time. Roger remembered vividly a seminar delivered by John Bardeen at the Cavendish when Josephson (barely out of undergraduate school) corrected Bardeen on a subtle point. Despite Bardeen’s strenuous representations to the contrary, young Josephson held his ground and, in a subsequent elaboration of his point, discovered the phenomenon (quantum tunneling of Cooper pairs thru’ non-superconducting barriers) for which he would be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973 (with Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever). Roger, so to speak, was present at that Creation.

In January 1964, on the completion of his academic career in England, Peverley came to the United States to Brown University, Rhode Island, as a Research Associate where he resumed his Fermi surface investigations. In 1966, he became Assistant Professor (later Associate Professor) at Catholic University. There he made an immediate impression both as a researcher and as a teacher. Then followed an enforced stint as a District of Columbia taxi-driver during the lean years (for young scientists) 1974-76. Roger was inordinately proud of his brief career in public transportation. During his Cambridge years he had been an outstanding amateur car racing driver, competing in, and often winning, rallies in Britain and Ireland.

In 1977, the George Washington University demonstrated unusual perception by acquiring the services of Roger Peverley as a Visiting Assistant Professor, where once again, he was to make an immediate impression as a researcher and teacher.

Peverley made numerous contributions to the determination of electron-phonon scattering rates in metals, a technique that he pioneered during his years at the Cavendish. To facilitate analysis of the data he used the technique of F(ast) F(ourier) T(ransforms), invented by Karl Friedrich Gauss in 1805 and later, in 1965, also by J W Tukey and John Cooley. Roger analyzed the process of ultrasonic attenuation in free electron metals, described by a spherical Fermi surface, under conditions of arbitrary magnetic field and arbitrary sound polarization using a generalized model for electron scattering. Exploiting novel computational methods he obtained numerical solutions of Boltzmann’s transport equation to describe the transfer and absorption of the electronic energy by the metal medium. In this way he was able to generate plots of the shape of the Fermi surface showing the distortion caused by sound waves.

Twelve PhD candidates, at both Catholic and George Washington Universities, benefited from Roger’s wise and expert tutelage. He was equally attentive to the needs of students at the elementary level and enormously appreciated by all his students, both elementary and advanced. There does not appear to be any duty associated with the academic enterprise that Roger Peverley could not handle with graceful ease and meticulous attention to detail. His many contributions to a wide variety of departmental, college and university committees are legendary. Students seemed to flock around his office, usually overflowing his office hours. At GW he was the perennially elected deputy chair (meaning, of course, that he did most of the chair’s work). He taught courses at all levels from the ‘physics for poets’ variety to the most advanced graduate courses. He made no academic social distinctions. He was as accommodating to the needs of the rawest student as he was to those of the University president (perhaps a little more attentive in the case of the former). He was the epitome of an English gentleman. Academe and the physics community, in particular, is the poorer for his passing.