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Death noticeHans Pieter Roetert Frederikse Submitted by Physics Today Editorial Staff Published on 3 April 2008 Current comments and reminiscences on Hans Pieter Roetert Frederikse:Obituary from the Washington Post (Sunday, March 16, 2008)
Hans Pieter Roetert Frederikse, 87, who was Chief of the Solid-State Physics Section at the National Bureau of Standards for 22 years, died on March 6, 2008 at his home in Kensington, MD. He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Hans Frederikse was born on July 13, 1920 in The Hague and began studying physics at the University of Leiden in 1937. In 1940, after Nazi forces had occupied the Netherlands, he helped lead a student protest against the Nazis' dismissal of Jewish professors that led to the closing of the university. Hans was one of a few graduate students who stayed on at the closed university to work in the Kamerling Onnes Laboratory and escaped the roundup of Dutch students sent to labor camps in Germany. He took part in the Dutch underground resistance movement and helped find hiding places for Jewish children whose parents had been sent to German concentration camps, taking them on his bicycle to foster homes in the countryside. In addition to his underground activities, Hans carried on research throughout the war and received a masterΓ s degree in physics when Leiden reopened in 1945. While traveling through Germany to an International Student Service Conference in 1947, he was shocked at the devastated condition of German cities. As chairman of the University's Christian Student Council, he led an effort to build a peaceful bond between German and Dutch students, organizing a mixed group of 60 students to clear rubble and rebuild a damaged academic building at the University of Munster. One of those German students was Helmut Schmidt, who became the West German chancellor in 1974. After receiving his doctorate in physics from Leiden in 1950, he received a Fulbright Fellowship to study and teach at Purdue University. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1956. Hans joined the NBS staff in the Solid State Physics Section in 1953. While at Purdue, he had studied the thermal conductivity and thermoelectric power of germanium, and he continued his study of semiconductors as head of the NBS Solid State Physics Section from 1956 to 1978. Early on, the work of the section focused on the properties of III-IV semiconductors, especially on indium antimonide as an infrared detector. During this period he and a colleague, W. R. Hosler, observed for the first time the existence in semiconductors of the Shubnikov-deHaas effect, previously known only in metals. This discovery led to new understanding of the electronic band structures of semiconductors. His work in the field of semiconductor physics was recognized by the award of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961 to study dielectric-loss and relaxation mechanisms in solids at the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and by the award of the Department of Commerce Gold Medal for Γ profound advances in fundamental knowledge of solid-state physicsΓ in 1963. The sectionΓ s research interest shifted to the semiconducting and superconducting behavior of oxides and in 1964, with several colleagues, he collaborated with the NBS low-temperature-physics group to see whether superconductivity could exist in strontium titanate. This effort helped to generate the ideas that contributed to the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity by the 1987 Nobel Prize winners in phys winners in physics, J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alexander Müller. Later on, in the 1970's, when the section was involved in a new program on materials research for energy applications, some of these oxides ! were tested as high-temperature electrodes in MHD power converters. From 1978 to 1981, Hans served as chief of the Ceramics, Glass, and Solid State Division and then became Scientific Assistant to the Director, Institute for Materials Science until he retired in 1988. He continued to publish until 1992, both as sole author and in collaboration with his colleagues. He served on the National Research CouncilΓ s Solid State Advisory Panel and was Section Editor for the Solid State Physics section of the 3rd Edition of the American Institute of Physics Handbook (1972). He personally contributed much of the data on semiconductors and inorganic solids in that section. After retirement he updated the section on Properties of Solids in the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, for which he was Associate Editor from 1993 to 1998. Hans was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society and, in 1982, Corresponding Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. He was also a member of Sigma Xi, the American Ceramics Society, the Netherlands Physics Society, and the Federation of American Scientists. Rosemary MacDonald
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