John Wickham Steeds (born 9 February 1940) is a British physicist and

materials scientist Materials science is an interdisciplinary field of researching and discovering materials. Materials engineering is an engineering field of finding uses for materials in other fields and industries. The intellectual origins of materials scien ...

. He is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the

University of Bristol The University of Bristol is a public university, public research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Merchant Venturers' school founded in 1595 and University College, Br ...

Research

Steeds is best known for his investigations of the

microstructure Microstructure is the very small scale structure of a material, defined as the structure of a prepared surface of material as revealed by an optical microscope above 25× magnification. The microstructure of a material (such as metals, polymer ...

of materials using

electron microscopy An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of electrons as a source of illumination. It uses electron optics that are analogous to the glass lenses of an optical light microscope to control the electron beam, for instance focusing i ...

and

convergent-beam electron diffraction Convergent beam electron diffraction (CBED) is an electron diffraction technique where a convergent or divergent beam (conical electron beam) of electrons is used to study materials. History CBED was first introduced in 1939 by Kossel and Möll ...

. Early in his career, he produced seminal work on

dislocation In materials science, a dislocation or Taylor's dislocation is a linear crystallographic defect or irregularity within a crystal structure that contains an abrupt change in the arrangement of atoms. The movement of dislocations allow atoms to sli ...

arrangements in deformed

copper Copper is a chemical element; it has symbol Cu (from Latin ) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkish-orang ...

crystals, which is a basis for the more recent theories of

work hardening Work hardening, also known as strain hardening, is the process by which a material's load-bearing capacity (strength) increases during plastic (permanent) deformation. This characteristic is what sets ductile materials apart from brittle materi ...

. His monograph on anisotropic elasticity theory of dislocations is a standard reference. He has led a sophisticated research effort to make, from image plane diffraction analysis ("real-space

crystallography Crystallography is the branch of science devoted to the study of molecular and crystalline structure and properties. The word ''crystallography'' is derived from the Ancient Greek word (; "clear ice, rock-crystal"), and (; "to write"). In J ...

") and convergent-beam diffraction, a complete system for crystallographic structure determination in the electron microscope. He is recognised as a world expert in this technique. Significant applications include

precipitate In an aqueous solution, precipitation is the "sedimentation of a solid material (a precipitate) from a liquid solution". The solid formed is called the precipitate. In case of an inorganic chemical reaction leading to precipitation, the chemic ...

structure in

steels Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon that demonstrates improved mechanical properties compared to the pure form of iron. Due to steel's high elastic modulus, yield strength, fracture strength and low raw material cost, steel is one of the m ...

, new phases in the contact regions of

integrated circuit An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...

s and the correction of important errors in the structure of

transition metal dichalcogenides : 220px, Cadmium sulfide, a prototypical metal chalcogenide, is used as a yellow pigment. A chalcogenide is a chemical compound consisting of at least one chalcogen anion and at least one more electropositive element. Although all group 16 elements ...

. With the first observation of

soliton In mathematics and physics, a soliton is a nonlinear, self-reinforcing, localized wave packet that is , in that it preserves its shape while propagating freely, at constant velocity, and recovers it even after collisions with other such local ...

s (discommensurations) in the stripe and triply incommensurate states of these layer compounds, he has produced dynamic images of the basic phase-transition mechanisms.

Awards and honours

Steeds was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1988. One or more of the preceding sentences may incorporate text from the royalsociety.org website where "all text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License"
Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies
Intellectual property rights). In 1996, he received the Holweck Medal, awarded jointly by the

Institute of Physics The Institute of Physics (IOP) is a UK-based not-for-profit learned society and professional body that works to advance physics education, physics research, research and applied physics, application. It was founded in 1874 and has a worldwide ...

and

Société Française de Physique The Société Française de Physique (SFP), or the French Physical Society, is the main professional society of French physicists. It was founded in 1873 by Joseph-Charles d'Almeida. History The French Physical Society is a state-approved non- ...

References

External links

John Wickham Steeds
Eminent Cavendish Physicists, University of Cambridge {{DEFAULTSORT:Steeds, John 1940 births Living people Fellows of the Royal Society British physicists British materials scientists Academics of the University of Bristol Alumni of Selwyn College, Cambridge Fellows of the Institute of Physics