My Life with Erwin: The Beginning of an Atom-Probe Legacy, by John A. Panitz

When: Tue, Nov 13 2018 6:00pm

Where: Centennial Engineering Center

The 21 Club wishes to thank our speaker, John Panitz (Professor of Physics and Astronomy), for an excellent presentation.

The Atom-Probe Field Ion Microscope was introduced in 1967. It was, and remains, the only instrument capable of determining the chemical identity of one single atom seen on a metal surface and selected from neighboring atoms at the discretion of the observer. The development of the Atom-Probe is a story of an instrument that one NSF reviewer called “impossible because single atoms could not be detected”. It is also a story of my life with Erwin Wilhelm Müller as his graduate student in the Field Emission Laboratory at the Pennsylvania State University in the late 1960s and his strong and volatile personality that arguably cost him the Nobel Prize in Physics, a personality perhaps fostered by his pedigree as Gustav Hertz's student in the Berlin of the 1930s. It is the story that has defined my scientific career.

J. A. Panitz is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and the founder of High-Field Consultants. He joined UNM in 1988 and during his tenure he was Professor of Physics, High Technology Materials and Cell Biology in the School of Medicine. At UNM he developed Visual E&M the first undergraduate laboratory courseware that encouraged critical thinking and role playing in the structured environment of cooperative learning groups. Professor Panitz was president of the 21 Club from 2008 to 2012.

From 1970 to 1988 Professor Panitz was a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque. At Sandia he invented and patented the first field emission immunochemical sensor and the Field Desorption Spectrometer that became the Imaging Atom Probe - the progenitor of commercial atom probes and Atom Probe Tomography.