Nevill Francis Mott The Nobel Prize in Physics 1977

biography

Early years

Nevill Francis Mott was born in Leeds on 30 September 1905. His father, Charles Francis Mott, who later became Director of Education of Liverpool, and his mother, Lillian Mary Mott n?e Reynolds, had been research students together under J.J. Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. Mott was educated at Clifton College, Bristol and St John’s College, Cambridge where he studied mathematics and theoretical physics.

Career

After three years research in applied mathematics he was appointed to a lectureship at Manchester University in 1929. He returned to Cambridge in 1930 as a Fellow and lecturer of Gonville and Caius College and in 1933 moved to Bristol University as Melville Wills Professor in Theoretical Physics. In 1948 he became Henry Overton Wills Professor of Physics and Director of the Henry Herbert Wills Physical Laboratory at Bristol. In 1954 he was appointed Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge, a post he held until 1971. Additionally he served as Master of Gonville and Caius College, 1959-1966.

Research and publications

Mott’s early research at Cambridge established his reputation in the application of the new ideas of wave mechanics to collisions of atomic particles. On moving to Bristol he left this field for that of metals and alloys, establishing an international reputation there too within a few years. Later he turned to research on semiconductors and insulators, and to problems concerned with the formation of a latent image in a photographic emulsion. During Mott’s twenty-one years at Bristol his group occupied a position of great eminence in theoretical physics. War-related work during the Second World War was concerned with the propagation of radio waves and the explosive fragmentation of shell and bomb cases. Mott’s appointment as Cavendish Professor inevitably led to a greater involvement in administration both in the laboratory and the university and he assumed a number of positions nationally and internationally, both within the scientific community and more widely, for example, in the field of education. Nevertheless he remained active in research. The work for which he shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in the area of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems was begun in the 1960s, while in his final years he was engaged in investigations of high temperature superconductivity. Mott was not only one of the great theoreticians of the twentieth-century, his work in semiconductors and solid state physics had great practical implications, enabling improvements to be made to the performance of electronic circuits, including computer memories, and in making more efficient solar energy cells.

In addition to a great number of scientific papers Mott was the author of a number of major books including The Theory of Atomic Collisions (with H.S.W. Massey, 1933), Electronic Processes in Non-Crystalline Materials (with E.A. Davis, 1971), Metal-Insulator Transitions (1974) and Conduction in Non-Crystalline Materials (1986). He also edited a volume of essays by scientists on religious belief Can scientists believe? (1991). In 1986 Mott published an autobiography A life in science.

Honours and awards

Mott was elected FRS in 1936 (Hughes Medal 1941, Royal Medal 1953, Copley Medal 1972; Bakerian Lecture 1953, Rutherford Memorial Lecture 1962, Humphry Davy Lecture 1988), and was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics (with P.W. Anderson and J.H. Van Vleck) ‘for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems’. He was knighted in 1962 and made a Companion of Honour in 1995. He died on 8 August 1996.

SCOPE AND CONTENT OF THE PAPERS

The papers were received from Mrs Alice Crampin, daughter, in December 1997. Placed in Cambridge University Library in 2002. They span the period from 1929 to 1996. Arrangement: By section as follows: Biographical, Research, Lectures and publications, Societies and organisations, Visits and conferences, Religion, Correspondence. Index of correspondents. Index of correspondents. 16 boxes. Biographical material is slight. It includes, however, drafts for his autobiography and a bibliography, albeit incomplete.

Research papers principally comprise a sequence of published papers, pre-prints etc by other scientists annotated by Mott or occasionally by collaborators such as A.S. Alexandrov, 1946-1996 (bulk 1983-1996). In addition there are a very small number of notes and drafts by Mott and others, 1989-1996. Only a small number of Mott’s public and invitation lectures are documented, 1964, 1986-1994. There is a major sequence of drafts for his scientific publications, 1961-1996 which is especially substantial for his last years though not always straightforward in its interpretation. Publications correspondence is not extensive and his long association with Taylor & Francis is represented by a relatively few papers, 1980-1996. There is a substantial but incomplete set of Mott’s off-prints, 1929-1995.

There is documentation of Mott’s association with eleven British and international societies and organisations. His interests in nuclear weapons issues and defence questions more widely are reflected in the papers of the Oxford Research Group and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Although Mott was a Fellow of the Royal Society from 1936 the record presented here covers the period 1976-1993 only, and relates almost entirely to his interests in science education. There is a record of a small number of visits and conferences attended by Mott in the UK and overseas for about twenty years from 1977 including invitations for 1996 and 1997 he was not able to fulfil. In addition to visits and conferences associated with Mott’s scientific research there are records of a seminar on ‘gifted’ children at Cambridge, 1981 and the Second Nova Spes Colloquium of Nobel Prizewinners in Rome, November 1987 when Mott met the Pope. There is useful documentation of Mott’s developing interest in religion in his later years. There is correspondence, 1977-1996, including a small group of papers kept separately by Mott about the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans K?ng, and drafts for Can scientists believe?, Mott’s shorter publications and writings, and sermons. Finally, there is a chronological sequence of correspondence, 1968-1996, reflecting Mott’s continuing interest in research to the end of his life. It includes correspondence and papers on energy questions, especially solar energy and photovoltaics, and high temperature superconductivity. The sequence is predominantly incoming.

Nevill Francis Mott was born in Leeds, U.K., on September 30th, 1905. His parents, Charles Francis Mott and Lilian Mary (n?e) Reynolds, met when working under J.J. Thomson in the Cavendish Laboratory; his great grandfather was Sir John Richardson, the arctic explorer. He was educated at Clifton College, Bristol and St. John's College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and theoretical physics. He started research in Cambridge under R.H. Fowler, in Copenhagen under Niels Bohr and in G?ttingen under Max Born, and spent a year as a lecturer at Manchester with W.L. Bragg before accepting a lectureship at Cambridge. Here he worked on collision theory and nuclear problems in Rutherford's laboratory. In 1933 he went to the chair of theoretical physics at Bristol, and under the influence of H. W. Skinner and H. Jones turned to the properties of metals and semiconductors. Work during his Bristol period before the war included a theory of transition metals, of rectification, hardness of alloys (with Nabarro) and of the photographic latent image (with Gurney). After a period of military research in London during the war, he became head of the Bristol physics department, publishing papers on low-temperature oxidation (with Cabrera) and the metal-insulator transition. In 1954 he was appointed Cavendish Professor of Physics, a post which he held till 1971, serving on numerous government and university committees. The research for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize began about 1965. Some of his main books are "The Theory of Atomic Collisions" (with H.S.W. Massey), "Electronic Processes in Ionic Crystals" (with R.W. Gurney) and "Electronic Processes in Non-Crystalline Materials" (with E.A. Davis).

Outside research in physics he has taken a leading part in the reform of science education in the United Kingdom and is still active on committees about educational problems. He was chairman of a Pugwash meeting in Cambridge in 1965. He was chairman of the board and is now president of Taylor & Francis Ltd., scientific publishers since 1798. He was Master of his Cambridge college (Gonville and Caius) from 1959-66. He was President of the International Union of Physics from 1951 to 1957, and holds more than twenty honorary degrees, including Doctor of Technology at Linkoping.

In 1930 he married Ruth Eleanor Horder. They have two daughters and three grandchildren, Emma, Edmund and Cecily Crampin. For the last ten years he has lived in a village, Aspley Guise, next door to his son-in-law and family. During this period he has written an autobiography "A Life in Science" (Taylor and Francis) and edited a book with several authors on a religion-science interface "Can Scientists Believe?" (James and James, London), together with many scientific papers, mainly in the last 3 years on high-temperature superconductors.

From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1971-1980, Editor Stig Lundqvist, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1992 This autobiography/biography was first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

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