Thomas Maurice Rice facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
T. Maurice Rice
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| Born | 26 January 1939 Dundalk, Ireland
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| Died | 18 July 2024 (aged 85) Küsnacht, Switzerland
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| Fields | Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics |
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Thomas Maurice Rice (born January 26, 1939, died July 18, 2024) was a very smart scientist from Ireland. He was known as Maurice Rice. He became an American citizen too. He was a theoretical physicist, which means he used math and ideas to understand how materials work. He specialized in something called condensed matter physics, which is about the properties of solids and liquids.
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Maurice Rice's Early Life and Education
Maurice Rice was born in Dundalk, Ireland, on January 26, 1939. He was the younger brother of a famous engineer named Peter Rice. Maurice grew up in Dundalk with his two siblings.
School and University
Like his brother, Maurice went to the local Christian Brothers school, Coláiste Rís. After that, he studied physics at University College Dublin in Ireland. He then continued his studies at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
Moving to America and Switzerland
In 1964, Maurice moved to the United States. He worked for two years at the University of California, San Diego. In 1966, he joined Bell Labs, a famous research company in New Jersey. He stayed there until 1981. Then, he moved to Zürich, Switzerland, to work at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH).
Maurice, his wife Helen, and their three children (a son and two daughters) moved from New Jersey to Zürich. Maurice stopped teaching in 2004. He became an Emeritus Professor at ETH, which means he was still connected to the university after retiring.
Maurice Rice's Scientific Work
Maurice Rice started his career when the study of materials was growing fast. Scientists were no longer just looking at simple metals. They were exploring many new types of materials. This meant Maurice often worked with other scientists. He teamed up with both theorists (who work with ideas) and experimentalists (who do experiments). Together, they studied the electronic properties of these new materials.
Work at Bell Labs
In the 1960s and 1970s, Maurice worked at Bell Labs. He studied how some materials change from being a metal to an insulator. He also looked at how electrons behave in semiconductors when light shines on them. He explored special waves called charge and spin density waves that can form in materials.
Research on Superconductors
In the early 1980s, Maurice moved to ETH Zurich. A few years later, scientists nearby discovered high-temperature superconductivity. This was a huge breakthrough! It meant some materials could conduct electricity perfectly at much warmer temperatures than before.
Maurice quickly changed his research to focus on these new superconductors. These materials, called cuprates, became a very important topic in physics. Maurice and his team worked to understand how these materials worked at a tiny, atomic level. They tried to explain the strange "pseudogap phase" that appeared in these materials.
Brinkman-Rice Transition
In 1970, Maurice Rice and William F. Brinkman worked together. They helped explain how materials change from being a metal to an insulator. They published an important paper about this. Their work added to earlier ideas about these changes in materials.
Awards and Special Recognitions
Maurice Rice received many awards and honors for his important work:
- He received an honorary science degree from the National University of Ireland in 1989.
- He became an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1988.
- He was chosen as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1993.
- He became a Fellow of The Royal Society in 2002.
- He won the EPS Europhysics Prize in 1998.
- He received the John Bardeen Prize in 2000.
