September 7, 2007

In Memoriam: Jamshed "Jim" Patel

Advanced Light Source user Jamshed (Jim) Patel, who played a large role in the history of the NSLS, died on March 3, 2007 at the age of 81.

Jim received his master’s degree in mechanical engineering and Ph.D. in metallurgy in his native India. After working in the Materials Sciences Division at Bell Laboratories for many years, Jim moved to California in 1994, where he held a joint position at the ALS and SSRL/SLAC Stanford University. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, he also held numerous visiting and consulting positions at several international science institutions including the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France; the NSLS; CHESS (Cornell); and Intel Corporation in Santa Clara.

Jim Patel

At the NSLS, Patel was one of the initial investigators for one of the Bell Labs beamlines that were conceived and constructed during the 1980s – X15A. At that time, Patel’s focus was on the use of x-ray standing waves in ultra-high vacuum (UHV) surface science experiments, an application for which Patel was among the early group of investigators (there were active groups in this application during the 1980s at CHESS, HASYLAB, Bell Labs, NSLS, the Photon Factory, and Daresbury). After obtaining initial success using an experimental chamber at Bell Labs (for which a laboratory x-ray source provided the incident beam), Patel initially worked with Jene Golovchenko, and later with Jorg Zegenhagen, to develop a molecular beam epitaxy experimental chamber that would be dedicated for these experiments at the NSLS. The interval of time when Patel’s experimental efforts were mostly at NSLS, beginning in the late 1980s and continuing until he retired from Bell Labs in 1994, was a very productive period of his career. During this time, Patel also began some of the microprobe work at the NSLS that he later delved deeply into at the ALS after moving there following his retirement from Bell Labs.

A Collaborator’s Perspective

Lonny Berman
Brookhaven National Laboratory

"I recently looked through the acknowledgements section of my Ph.D. thesis, in which it is mentioned that 'Discussions related to this thesis work with Jim Patel and Jene Golovchenko were quite helpful.' The story of my interactions with Jim Patel began not at NSLS or Bell Labs, but at Cornell University. Jim and Bob Batterman (my Ph.D. advisor) go back together for a long time. There was only one individual outside of Cornell who Bob would loan his delicate equipment to, and that was Jim. Sure enough, a solid-state detector was shuttled back and forth from Cornell to Bell Labs, once when it was needed for an experiment at CHESS. Suddenly recognizing that his detector was not available, Bob wondered where it was. We told him that someone from Bell Labs had come to borrow it, and immediately Bob knew that it was in Jim’s hands, because it could be in no one else’s. Bob phoned Jim to mention that he was in need of the detector, and without delay, it was driven back to Cornell, wearing a seat belt in the back seat of a car (and with its dewar full with liquid nitrogen…in those days, solid-state detectors could not be warmed up without risk of damage, even when not in use).

Later, while carrying out my Ph.D. thesis experiments, I encountered difficulties in routinely achieving a clean surface of a silicon crystal in my UHV chamber without damaging it as a result of excessive thermal stress from high-temperature annealing. Bob suggested that I contact Jim for advice. I did, and sure enough, Jim described to me a chemical pre-treatment recipe that he had been having success with, for the same objective, without a need to undertake high-temperature annealing. Well, I tried it, and it almost worked flawlessly. As it happened, Jim quoted to me an older recipe, that was missing a crucial step, which was incorporated later in an update. Somehow, the older recipe did help somewhat in reducing the need for high-temperature annealing, and my silicon crystal survived just long enough for me to obtain a Ph.D. Post-mortem x-ray topographs and rocking curve measurements, and finally a destructive chemical etch applied to the crystal, showed clearly the nature of the damage that it sustained. A year later, I mentioned all of this to Jim, and he kind of chuckled.

These are but a few sentiments expressed by one who felt an influence by Jim, and where there is one, there are many. Many others have been much more profoundly affected and influenced by Jim than I was. To this day, I still examine the x-ray topographs, rocking curves, and chemical etch pit maps that I measured on my deformed crystals at Cornell, and in so doing I am reminded of Jim. Funny how techniques that Jim helped to pioneer back in the 1950s, particularly involving x-ray topography, are still so valuable today, and helped one graduate student to see the light about 20 years ago."