Dan Shechtman

Dan Shechtman דן שכטמן
Distinguished Prof. Dan Shechtman, 2011 Nobel Laureate, at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in 2011.
Born	January 24, 1941 (1941-01-24) Tel Aviv, Israel
Residence	Israel
Citizenship	Israel
Fields	Materials Science
Institutions	Wright Patterson Air Force Base Johns Hopkins University NIST Iowa State University Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Alma mater	Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Known for	Quasicrystals
Notable awards	Wolf Prize in Physics (1998) Israel Prize (1999) Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2011)

Dan Shechtman (Hebrew: דן שכטמן) (born January 24, 1941 in Tel Aviv) is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University. On April 8, 1982, while on sabbatical at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., Shechtman discovered the icosahedral phase, which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals. He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the discovery of quasicrystals".

Technion President Peretz Lavie, Dan Shechtman and Wayne Kaplan at the Nobel Prize press conference at Technion, Israel.

Biography

Interview with Dan Shechtman after his Nobel lecture

Dan Shechtman was born in Tel Aviv, Mandate Palestine. He is married to Prof. Tzipora Shechtman, Head of the Department of Counseling and Human Development at Haifa University, and author of two books on psychotherapy. They have a son Yoav Shechtman (a PhD student in physics) and three daughters: Tamar Finkelstein (an organizational psychologist at the Israeli police leadership center), Ella Shechtman-Cory (a PhD in clinical psychology), and Ruth Dougoud-Nevo (also a PhD in clinical psychology).

Academic career

After receiving his Ph.D. in Materials Engineering from the Technion in 1972, where he also obtained his B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering in 1966 and M.Sc. in Materials Engineering in 1968, Prof. Shechtman was an NRC fellow at the Aerospace Research Laboratories at Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio, where he studied for three years the microstructure and physical metallurgy of titanium aluminides. In 1975 he joined the department of materials engineering at Technion. In 1981–1983 he was on Sabbatical at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied rapidly solidified aluminum transition metal alloys, in a joint program with NBS. During this study he discovered the Icosahedral Phase which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals.

In 1992–1994 he was on sabbatical at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he studied the effect of the defect structure of CVD diamond on its growth and properties. Shechtman's Technion research is conducted in the Louis Edelstein Center, and in the Wolfson Centre which is headed by him. He served on several Technion Senate Committees and headed one of them.

Shechtman joined the Iowa State faculty in 2004. He currently spends about five months a year in Ames on a part-time appointment.

Work on quasicrystals

Meeting at NIST in 1985 where Shechtman (left) explains the atomic structure of quasicrystals

Shechtman's Nobel Prize winning work was in the area of quasicrystals, ordered crystalline materials lacking repeating structures, such as this Al-Pd-Mn alloy.

Shechtman experienced several years of hostility toward his non-periodic interpretation (no less a figure than Linus Pauling said "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists."). Pauling was apparently unaware of a paper in 1981 by H. Kleinert and K. Maki which had pointed out the possibility of a non-periodic Icosahedral Phase in quasicrystals (see the historical notes). The head of Shechtman's research group told him to "go back and read the textbook" and then "asked him to leave for 'bringing disgrace' on the team." Shechtman felt rejected. Later, other scientists began to confirm and accept empirical findings of the existence of quasicrystals.

The Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that "his discovery was extremely controversial," but that his work "eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter." Through Shechtman's discovery, several other groups were able to form similar quasicrystals, finding these materials to have low thermal and electrical conductivity, while possessing high structural stability. Quasicrystals have also been found naturally.

Quasicrystalline materials could be used in a large number of applications, including the formation of durable steel used for fine instrumentation, and non-stick insulation for electrical wires and cooking equipment.

The prize is worth 10-million swedish Krona ($1.5-million).

Awards

• 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of quasicrystals
• 2008 European Materials Research Society (E-MRS) 25th Anniversary Award
• 2002 EMET Prize in Chemistry
• 2000 Muriel & David Jacknow Technion Award for Excellence in Teaching
• 2000 Gregori Aminoff Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
• 1999 Wolf Prize in Physics.
• 1998 Israel Prize, for Physics.
• 1993 Weizmann Science Award^{[citation needed]}
• 1990 Rothschild Prize in Engineering^{[citation needed]}
• 1988 New England Academic Award of the Technion^{[citation needed]}
• 1988 International Award for New Materials^{[citation needed]} of the American Physical Society
• 1986 Physics Award of the Friedenberg Fund for the Advancement of Science and Education^{[citation needed]}

Published works

• "Metallic Phase with Long-Range Orientational Order and No Translational Symmetry". Physical Review Letters 53 (20): 1951. 1984. Bibcode 1984PhRvL..53.1951S. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.53.1951. 
• "Nuclear γ-ray resonance observations in an aluminum-based icosahedral quasicrystal". Physical Review B 32 (2): 1383. 1985. Bibcode 1985PhRvB..32.1383S. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.32.1383. 
• "Pauling's model not universally accepted". Nature 319: 102. 1986. doi:10.1038/319102a0. 
• "The Icosahedral Quasiperiodic Phase". Physica Scripta 49: 49. 1988. doi:10.1088/0031-8949/1988/T23/008. 

See also

• List of Israel Prize recipients
• List of Jewish Nobel laureates

Further reading

• D. P. DiVincenzo and P. J. Steinhardt, eds. 1991. Quasicrystals: The State of the Art. Directions in Condensed Matter Physics, Vol 11. ISBN 981-02-0522-8.
• T. Janssen. 2007. Quasicrystals: Comparative dynamics. Nature Materials, Vol 6., 925-926.

External links

• Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy
• Story of quasicrystals as told by Shechtman to APS News in 2002.
• Biography/CV Page – Technion
• TechnionLIVE e-newsletter
• Dan Shechtman (Iowa State faculty page)