Nevill Francis Mott
English physicist, Nobel prize winner · United Kingdom · Scientists · Lived 1905 to 1996 · aged 90
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Something wrong?A theorist who cracked why some materials conduct electricity and others don't - even when they look almost identical. His work on amorphous semiconductors helped explain the switches inside disorder itself.
A life in dates
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, Any scientist, myself or another, can become so enamoured of his brain child that he resents criticism.
The hypothesis that the electron has a magnetic moment was, as is well known, first introduced to account for the duplexity phenomena of atomic spectra.
... in terms of modern solid state physics, what does “transparent” mean?
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Nevill Francis Mott was born 30 September 1905 in Britain and spent his career in theoretical physics, drawn to questions other physicists found messy: the electronic behavior of materials that refused clean categories. He focused on magnetic and disordered systems, particularly amorphous semiconductors - substances without the tidy crystal structure that most theories assumed. Working in parallel with Philip W. Anderson and John Van Vleck, Mott clarified why certain magnetic or amorphous materials could be metallic under one set of conditions and insulating under another, a puzzle that had frustrated experimentalists for years. In 1977 the three shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for loosely related research on electronic structure. Mott died 8 August 1996.
In common with Nevill
Louis NéelBoth received Three Physicists Prize
Walter KohnBoth received Three Physicists Prize
Giorgio ParisiBoth received Three Physicists Prize
Hendrik CasimirBoth received Three Physicists Prize
Claude Cohen-TannoudjiBoth received Three Physicists Prize
Françoise CombesBoth received Three Physicists PrizeFame.am measures public visibility signals. It does not measure human value, talent, morality, or credibility.