Professor Marshall Stoneham

“Points defects” are places in a substance where a small number of impure atoms are present, or the atoms are out of place. Such atomic flaws are vital in determining many key properties of a material – from how a semiconductor conducts electricity to the mechanical failure of a component in an extreme environment, such as a nuclear reactor.

Marshall Stoneham

Stoneham’s work made him one of the leading figures in the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Harwell from the mid-1960s, an era when it became apparent that waste disposal and the challenges of finding materials to build the reactors themselves, not nuclear physics, were the key scientific issues for the nuclear power programme to overcome. He was particularly known for showing how the lightest atom, hydrogen, can move very quickly through metals even when they are relatively cool; this explained how the hydrogen atoms could gather at the boundaries between the microscopic grains of metal crystal within the material, causing it to become brittle and fracture.

Arthur Marshall Stoneham was born on May 18 1940 in Barrow-in-Furness to Garth Rivers Stoneham and the former Nancy Leslie. He was educated at Barrow Grammar School for Boys, which he later credited with such excellent science teaching that it produced three Fellows of the Royal Society in the space of 15 years. He was awarded a BSc at Bristol University and remained there to complete his PhD with Maurice Pryce.

In 1964 he joined the theoretical physics division at AERE Harwell, where he was to spend more than 30 years, becoming successively head of the solid-state and quantum physics group; head of the materials physics and metallurgy division; and chief scientist of the what was by then known as AEA Industrial Technology.

He loved the intellectual environment of Harwell (then one of the world’s great laboratories), and in particular relished the chance to combine fundamental, theoretical work with a wide range of applied projects, where his penetrating insights and encyclopedic knowledge of materials physics could quickly yield a solution or point the way forward. He was particularly proud of the quality of the research group he assembled around him, and many of his co-workers went on to important positions at Harwell and beyond.

When the environment at Harwell became less conducive to fundamental research, Stoneham accepted an invitation from the then Provost, Sir Derek Roberts, to move in 1995 to UCL, becoming Massey Professor of Physics and director of the centre for materials research. He also joined the newly established condensed matter and materials physics group in the department of physics and astronomy and, along with the group’s first head, John Finney, set about building it up into a major international centre. Its development gave rise to today’s London Centre for Nanotechnology, which aims to solve global problems in information processing, health care, energy and the environment through technologies that manipulate matter on a molecular scale.
Stoneham himself loved interacting with the wide range of materials-related work around UCL, and personally developed projects in areas as diverse as minimally-invasive dentistry, odour recognition, diamond-film growth and quantum information science, where the microscopic laws of quantum physics are used to manipulate information in new ways. Here his new ideas, again combining materials science and fundamental physics, led to a substantial and ongoing research programme.
Alongside his dedication to Harwell and UCL he pursued outside interests at an exceptionally high level. He was a keen amateur horn player and musicologist, playing in a long-standing wind ensemble and performing the extremely difficult solo part of the Strauss Horn Concerto in concert. His prize-winning Wind Ensemble Sourcebook (1997) was a survey of extant wind harmony music and was the fruit of years of research in libraries around the world, many of them visited alongside trips to conferences and collaborators.
With his wife, the physicist Doreen Stoneham, whom he had married in 1962, he also founded Oxford Authentication, a small company which has been highly successful in the authentication of fine-art ceramics by thermoluminescence dating.
He received numerous honours, including fellowships of the Institute of Physics; the American Physical Society; and (in 1989) the Royal Society, whose Zeneca prize lecture he gave in 1995. He served on the Royal Society’s council from 1994-96. He was awarded the Guthrie Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics in 2006, and before becoming the Institute’s president had also served it for two terms as editor of one of its most important journals, Journal of Physics; Condensed Matter. He was also an Honorary Fellow of UCL.
His many publications include the definitive Theory of Defects in Solids (1975) which laid a firm intellectual foundation to the whole subject; Defects and Defect Processes in Non-Metallic Solids (1985); and Ionic Solids at High Temperatures (1989).
Marshall Stoneham is survived by his wife and their two daughters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8384052/Professor-Marshall-Stoneham.html