Harry George Drickamer

Harry George Drickamer, a pioneer in high-pressure studies of condensed matter, a professor of chemical engineering, chemistry and physics at the University of Illinois for 56 years, died of stroke on Monday, May 6, 2002 in Urbana, Illinois.

Already 50 years ago, Harry Drickamer conceived the idea that pressure should be a powerful tool for investigating electronic phenomena in condensed phases. His work encompassed a wide variety of studies of the chemical, electrical, magnetic and optical properties of solids. The main theme of his work was the concept that pressure can change the properties of condensed matter systems by its effect on the electronic orbitals, a phenomenon which he called “pressure tuning “ of electronic orbitals. He showed that use of pressure gave a powerful and versatile approach to investigation of electronic phenomena.

Harry was born on November 19, 1918 in Cleveland, Ohio. He was educated in public schools in East Cleveland. After graduating from high school early, he played minor league professional baseball in the Cleveland Indians farm system. He attended Vanderbilt University on football scholarship, then Indiana University, finally transferring to the University of Michigan where he received the B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 1941 and was President of his Engineering College class. In 1942, he married Mae Elizabeth McFillen and received the M.S. degree in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan.

During the World War II, Harry worked for Pan American Refining Corporation, in Texas City, Texas. Just before leaving for this job, he took and passed the PhD qualifying exam in Chemical Engineering. In Texas, in addition to his regular duties, Harry was busy nights and Sundays collecting experimental data which he presented for his PhD thesis after the end of the war. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1946.

The same year, Harry joined the University of Illinois at Urbana –Champaign. He became a member of both the Departments of Chemistry and of Chemical Engineering in recognition of the breadth of his research. He was later also appointed Professor of Physics. In 1963, he was made Professor in the Center of Advanced Study, the highest recognition the University bestows upon members of its faculty.

He guided more than 100 doctoral students and 20 postdoctoral students. His retirement in 1989 did not change his research schedule as he continued to maintain an active research group and was in his laboratory six days a week

Harry’s concept of “pressure tuning” has proved a tool of great power and versatility and now is used by many research groups throughout the world. The electrical, optical, magnetic and chemical properties of solids or fluids depend on the relative energies of the electronic orbitals associated with the ground and excited states of the outer electrons associated with the atoms or molecules. The effect of pressure is to decrease the volume and thus to increase the overlap among the electronic orbitals. Since different orbitals have different radial extent and shape they are perturbed in different degrees. The term describing these relative shifts in energy levels is pressure tuning.

Drickamer provided clear-cut tests for the following theories: the ligand field theory, Van Vleck’s theory of high spin to low spin transitions, Mulliken’s theory of electron donor –acceptor complexes, the Forster-Dexter theory of energy transfer in phosphors and theories of the efficiency of a variety of phosphors and laser materials including II-VI and III-V compounds exhibiting the zincblende structure, rare earth oxides, chelates and organic phosphors.

Electronic transitions he observed included insulator-conductor transitions for six elements and about 30 compounds as well as transitions involving the conduction electrons in alkali, alkaline earth, and rare earth metals. Paramagnetic – diamagnetic and ferromagnetic-paramagnetic transitions were observed in ferrous compounds and in iron. In addition, radicals were formed in many electron donor-acceptor complexes with high pressure which reacted to form new chemical bonds. Photochromic materials became thermochromic at high pressure. In recent years, his research expanded to protein chemistry, the efficiency of luminescent devices, and organic photochemistry.

He was elected to the National Academy of Science , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Among many awards he received were the Buckley Solid State Physics Award, the Irving Langmuir Award, the P.W. Bridgman and Michelson-Morley Awards, the John Scott Award from the City of Philadelphia, the Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry, the Robert Welch Award, the Cresson Medal from the Franklin Institute. In 1989 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. He received an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences (1994). The remarkable nature of his work is brought out by the fact that these honors were based both on research and teaching and are from organizations in physics, chemistry, and engineering.

In 1995, his former students contributed money for a professorship in his honor, but, as was typical of him, Harry decided it should be used to help graduate students, so Drickamer Fellowships were instituted in the Departments of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, and Physics. He will be sorely missed by his family, friends, and colleagues in the USA and abroad.

June, 25, 2002, Physics Today article by Charles Slichter and Jiri Jonas