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David Shoenberg (1911–2004)

2004; Nature Portfolio; Volume: 428; Issue: 6983 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1038/428613a

1476-4687

R. G. Chambers,

David Shoenberg was the last survivor of the distinguished group of scientists who established low-temperature physics as a flourishing discipline in Britain before the Second World War.His father was the electronic engineer Isaac (later Sir Isaac) Shoenberg, who came to England from Russia with his family in 1914, and who led the team at EMI that developed television for the BBC in the 1930s.At Cambridge in 1932, David Shoenberg became one of the very few research students taken on by Pyotr Kapitza, the brilliant Russian engineerphysicist who was then developing techniques for producing high magnetic fields.Kapitza set him on measuring the magnetostrictive effect -the minute length changes produced by a magnetic field -in bismuth.This was a project to test the ablest experimentalist, but one that Shoenberg completed successfully three years later.By that time he was on his own: in 1934, Kapitza had not been allowed to return from Russia after his annual summer holiday there.Shoenberg spent the next few years working mainly on superconductivity and writing a book that long remained the best introduction to the topic.In 1937 Kapitza invited him to Moscow to work for a year in his newly built laboratory.There Shoenberg began to study in earnest the phenomenon that was to occupy him, very fruitfully, for the next 50 years.The de Haas-van Alphen (dHvA) effect is an oscillatory variation of a metal's magnetic susceptibility with magneticfield strength at low temperatures, first observed in bismuth in 1930.Shoenberg and M. Z. Uddin had published a brief study of it in 1936, but now Shoenberg's measurements were far more sensitive and precise.It remained to interpret these strange oscillations.Rudolf Peierls had already produced a rather cumbersome theoretical explanation, but fortunately the brilliant Russian theoretician Lev Landau was also working in Kapitza's laboratory, and he at once came up with a much more powerful formulation, making the analysis of the experimental results far easier.In 1938, however, Landau was declared an 'enemy of the people' , and it became impossible to cite his work.