NEW MICROSCOPE BLESSED BY SIR PETER HIRSCH

Sir Peter Hirsch (b.1925) was educated in Cambridge, moving to Oxford in 1966 to take up the Wolfson Professorship in Materials. He then went on to become a towering figure in the Department of Materials. Celebrating his 100^th birthday, the Department’s current Director Professor Peter Nellist FRS, welcomed Sir Peter back to Oxford on March 17, where he spoke to a rapt audience at St Edmund Hall about his pioneering work in transmission electron microscopy (TEM) in the post-war years, and its application to the study of materials, particularly metals and alloys.

The same day featured a scientific symposium in Sir Peter’s honour, which included the launch of the latest microscope by the Department, a £3 million JEOL GrandARM300F which can magnify a sample to 1.2 million x (pictured).

Looking back at his formative days, Sir Peter recalled that after his undergraduate degree at Cambridge he applied for further study in low temperature physics and was turned down – ‘it was too popular.’

Born in 1925, he first came to the UK on the Kindertransport, a British rescue mission for Jewish children from Nazi Germany, and was subsequently part of a brilliant generation of émigré scientists who reinvigorated Oxford’s aspiration to be a world-leading research university.

The book Electron Microscopy of Thin Crystals by Peter Hirsch, A. Howie, R. B. Nicholson, D. W. Pashley, and M. J. Whelan was first published in 1965. It became a foundational text in the field of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and materials science, and was colloquially referred to as ‘The Yellow Bible.’

Hirsch, who after his knighthood was known to all as PBH led the department of Materials until 1992. He was also awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society in 1988, one of the highest honours in science.

The new microscope, the JEOL GrandARM300F, fills a small room and can cool a sample to prevent it degrading once subjected a beam. The sample shown on the left, is an atom from a flake of gold. An atom is 100 times smaller than 10 nanometres, which is in turn 10,000 times smaller than a human hair. Such magnification permits the interrogation of materials to their outermost structures, an examination of the material world that no one could have dreamed possible in previous generations.

Dr Gerardo Martinez (pictured left), who is responsible for the machine, showed it to QUAD and explained how it has the ability to allow ‘rapid changes of techniques for the same sample,’ allowing better data.

The characterisation of materials under various loads including radiation has a very wide application, from nuclear energy to battery and other ‘energy materials’ such as graphite. The other very topical application is semi-conductors, the particular specialisation of Dr Martinez.

Earlier microscopes are still onsite and are still used for a wide variety of experimentation.