Matthias, Bernd T., 1918-1980.

Solid-state physicist, pioneer in the study of superconductivity, and professor of physics at University of California, San Diego.

European born and educated physicist elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1965 and internationally recognizied for his discovery of more than 1,000 materials having the property of superconductivity.

Matthias's first U.S. appointment was in 1947 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was successively affiliated with Bell Laboratories (1947-1949, 1951-1956), the University of Chicago (1949-1951), Los Alamos National laboratory (1956-1961), and the University of California, San Diego (1961-1980). He maintained a research interest in superconductivity and ferromagnetism for the duration of his career.

Biography

Bernd Teo Matthias (1918-1980) was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on June 8, 1918. He completed his Ph.D. in physics in 1943 at the Eidgenďssische Technische Hochschule Zĕrich and continued his research there for four more years. He immigrated to the United Stated in 1947. Matthias was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1965 and is most noted for his discovery of nearly 1,000 superconducting materials.

Superconductivity is a phenomenon that occurs in metals at very low temperatures. When a metal is superconductive, it loses all electrical resistance. This means that electric currents can flow through a ring of superconducting material indefinitely, without losing any energy, as long as the material is kept at the very low temperature at which it becomes superconducting. Matthias's career focused on the search for materials with ever-higher transition temperatures.

In 1947, Matthias accepted an appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The following year he began an affiliation with the Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. On leave from Bell Labs in 1949-51, Matthias was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he developed a career-long collaborative relationship with Willy Zachariasen, a crystallographer and the head of Chicago's Physics Department at that time. While at the University of Chicago, Matthias turned to superconductivity and ferromagnetism in collaboration with John K. Hulm. His interest in the relationship between these two phenomena continued throughout his career.

In 1951, Matthias returned to Bell Labs where he discovered many more superconducting materials and developed the concept of "electron counting." This was an empirical guide that related the transition temperature of superconducting materials with their number of valence electrons per atom, a tool he used to discover many superconducting materials. Matthias was invited to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) as a consultant in the Theoretical Division in 1956 or 1957. In 1961 he joined the physics faculty at the University of California, San Diego, and maintained a part-time presence in the labs at Murray Hill. He also maintained a presence at LANL as well, collaborating there with some of his former UCSD students, thus participating in and conducting research in three labs simultaneously.

A year after joining the Physics Department at UCSD, Matthias founded the Institute for the Study of Matter, funded first by the Air Force and later by the National Science Foundation. In 1966, the Institute merged with the Physics Department's Institute for Pure and Applied Physical Sciences under the direction of Keith Brueckner. Matthias became associate director. Matthias explored the boundaries of science and metaphysics in his courses for undergraduates titled "Frontiers of Science." He was still actively researching and teaching when he died of a heart attack on October 27, 1980.