Brockhouse, Bertram N.

Bertram N. Brockhouse, in full Bertram Neville Brockhouse, (born July 15, 1918, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada—died October 13, 2003, Hamilton, Ontario), Canadian physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1994 with American physicist Clifford G. Shull for their separate but concurrent development of neutron-scattering techniques.

Brockhouse was educated at the University of British Columbia (B.A., 1947) and at the University of Toronto (M.A., 1948; Ph.D., 1950). He conducted his award-winning work from 1950 to 1962 at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratory, a facility operated by Atomic Energy of Canada. Brockhouse was a professor at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) from 1962 until his retirement in 1984.

In neutron-scattering techniques, a beam of neutrons is aimed at a target material, and the resultant scattering of the neutrons yields information about that material’s atomic structure. Brockhouse developed a variant technique known as inelastic neutron scattering, in which the relative energies of the scattered neutrons are measured to yield additional data. He used inelastic neutron scattering in his pioneering examination of phonons, which are units of the lattice vibrational energy expended by the scattered neutrons. He also developed the neutron spectrometer and was one of the first to measure the phonon dispersion curve of a solid.