News Article

Iowa State materials scientist to receive major international award

 

Contacts:
Dan Shechtman, Ames Laboratory, 515-294-3685, dansameslab.gov
Kerry Gibson, Ames Laboratory, 515-294-1405, kgibsonameslab.gov
Dennis Smith, Engineering Communications, 515-294-0267, dlsmithiastate.edu

Professor Dan Shechtman, a faculty member in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State University and a research scientist with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, has been named the 2008 recipient of the European Materials Research Society award.

The award, which is presented only once every five years, is the highest recognition conferred upon a materials scientist by the society, which is Europe’s leading organization for the support and advancement of research in materials. Shechtman will be formally recognized with the award at a ceremony and banquet to be held in Strasbourg. France, on May 28.

Shechtman is renowned for his discovery in 1982 of the icosahedral phase in rapidly solidified aluminum transition metal alloys, which opened up the field of quasi-periodic crystals as an area of study in materials science. The Materials Science and Engineering Department and Ames Laboratory on the Iowa State campus are today international leaders in quasicrystal research.

“It is rare when a discovery can inspire a scientific revolution, in which scientific principles are revised, textbooks rewritten, and fundamental definitions changed,” said Professor Richard LeSar, chair of Iowa State’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “Danny Shechtman's discovery of quasicrystals did just that.

“Most impressive was his spirit in defending his discovery against a very skeptical community,” LeSar added. “Winning the European Materials Research Society top award is a great honor and one he richly deserves.”

Shechtman’s discovery represented a paradigm shift in what had, until the early 1980s, been considered received wisdom in the science of crystallography: namely, that the atoms and molecules of all crystals are arranged in ordered, repeating patterns that extend in all three dimensions. However, by using electron diffraction rather than the more widely accepted application of x-ray diffraction, Shechtman discovered a limited class of crystals that, unlike normal crystals, demonstrate an icosahedral phase, making them only quasi-periodic.

Initially resisted by the scientific community, Shechtman’s discovery of quasicrystals fundamentally altered the science of crystallography. And although it took almost a decade for the significance of quasicrystals to be recognized, within 10 years the International Union FO Crystallographers acknowledged the scope of Shechtman’s achievement, and officially changed the definition of what constituted a “crystal” in the scientific literature.

Shechtman’s groundbreaking work was recognized in 1988 with The International Award for New Materials of the American Physical Society. In addition, he received the 1990 Rothchild Prize in Engineering and the1993 Weizmann Prize in Science. More recently, he was recognized in 1998 with the Israel Prize in Physics, the 1999 Wolf Prize in Physics, the Gregori Aminoff Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2000, and the 2002 EMET Prize in Chemistry.

Shechtman received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. from The Technion in Haifa, Israel, in 1966, 1968, and 1972, respectively. He was a Fellow of the National Research Council at Wright Patterson AFB from 1972 to 1975, when he joined the materials science faculty at The Technion, where he still holds an appointment. He discovered quasicrystals while a visiting scholar at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (formerly the National Bureau of Standards) from 1981 to 1983.

In addition to his work on the properties of quasicrystals, Shechtman has been active in the areas of metallic multilayers, phase transition, the rapid solidification of metallic alloys, and the structure and properties of CVD diamond wafers.

Shechtman is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering in the United States. He was elected in 2004 to the European Academy of Sciences.

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