Photo Courtesy of Phyllis
This collection recognizes the legacy and impact of Professor Joseph E. Greene, or “Joe,” as he was known to numerous colleagues and friends. Joe passed away on October 10, 2022, at age 77, following a multi-year battle with the results of a severe stroke suffered in 2019 at the 66th AVS International Symposium and Exhibition in Columbus, OH. The collection comprises 61 invited articles by a total of 290 authors from 21 countries from America, Asia, and Europe covering a wide range of topics in Surface Science, Nanoscience, Thin Films Physics, and Surface Engineering and in the many fields Joe Greene influenced and participated in. Joe's career spanned more than five decades, most of which was spent as a Professor of Physics and Materials Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He served simultaneously for many of those years as a Professor at Linköping University in Sweden and the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. Joe was frequently a consultant on Material Science, Physics, and Higher Education issues to governments and corporations worldwide. Following a long career at UIUC, he relocated to Jackson Hole, WY, where, in his spare time (between trips), he functioned as a volunteer back-country park ranger at Grand Teton National Park, whose role was finding and rescuing lost hikers or skiers.
Joe was born on November 25, 1944, in Arcata, CA and attended the University of Southern California in the 1960s before moving to UIUC in 1971 following his Ph.D. Over the course of his career, he mentored and graduated 70 Ph.D. students, and wrote or co-authored over 600 articles, 29 book chapters, and co-edited 4 books. He was widely known as an interesting and dynamic speaker at conferences and presented 140 plenary lectures and over 500 invited talks. Another educational component of his career was teaching Short Courses for the AVS, MRS, SVC, government laboratories, industrial companies and in many countries, including Mexico, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, China, and others. He did this often 10 or more times a year, and his courses were always fully booked.
Joe was a leader in the realm of Journal Editing. For 31 years starting in 1987, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Thin Solid Films, one of the premier journals in the field of thin films, electronic materials, and processing. He was also the Editor-in-Chief (1985–1998) of the journal CRC Critical Reviews in Solid State and Materials Sciences.
At the AVS, he served in a wide variety of roles, both at the national level and within the Thin Film and Advanced Surface Engineering Divisions. In the late 1970s, he was chair of the Scholarship Trustees, whose role was granting the National Awards from the Society. He later served in the 1980s on the Board of Directors and became AVS President in 1989. He chaired the Long-Range Planning committee in the 1990s, and then took on his longest role as Clerk of the Society for 22 years starting in 1997. Joe was in many ways both the historian and parliamentarian of the AVS Board meetings.
He served in the leadership of the Thin Film Division and the Advanced Surface Engineering Division (ASED), and was instrumental in the operation, along with his wife, Phyllis, of the annual ICMCTF meeting in San Diego.
Joe was one of the most respected voices at the International Union of Vacuum Science Technique and Applications, where he chaired the TFD (1989–1992), the Education committee (1992–2001), and the Emerging Societies Committee (2010–2019). He was the USA councilor from 2004 to 2020.
Joe received many awards and honors over the course of his career. On the technical side, this included the John A. Thornton Memorial Award (AVS), Fellow (AVS, APS, MRS), Honorary Member (AVS), the R. F. Bunshah Award (AVS-ASED), the Tage Erlander visiting professorship (Swedish Natural Science Research Council), honorary doctorate from Linköping University, a lifetime achievement award (Taiwan Association for Coating and Thin Film Technology), the Jan Czochralski award and gold medal (European MRS), as well as memberships in the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the European Academy of Sciences. He also had an interesting hobby as part of his many, many international trips, which was the study of ancient thin films or coatings in museums worldwide, made intentionally or accidentally many thousands of years ago. His pioneering work in this field led to an additional honor, the George Sarton Chair of the History of Science at Ghent University, Belgium. Another major award was the Aristotle Mentor Award (Semiconductor Research Corporation) for guiding so many students, post-docs, and visitors at UIUC, Linköping, and Taiwan, and in his extensive Short Course teaching.
Technically, Joe and his many colleagues and collaborators covered a wide range of areas. The earliest work was in developing what became known as “Greene Alloys,” which were a new class of metastable semiconducting alloys. This was followed by significant work with Si Atomic Layer Epitaxy (ALE) and Si1−xGex gas-source molecular beam epitaxy, which have had an impact worldwide.
The bulk of Joe's career was the study of the interplay between film deposition, properties, and the energetics of the deposition, typically the ratio of energetic ions to condensing or background gas atoms. Joe, and his colleagues at Linköping, focused initially on transition-metal nitrides and later transition-metal diborides.
Joe and his collaborators carried out systematic studies of the interplay between ion and neutral fluxes, the bombardment energies, and the subsequent materials properties, focusing on microstructure analysis using high resolution TEM, electron and x-ray diffraction along with compositional determination. This work led the field and resulted in literally hundreds of publications. They also carried out epitaxial studies of a wide range of nitrides using significant energy deposition through bombardment during deposition.
The work also focused on hardness, which was one of the key applications for some of these nitride films. Structures fabricated of superlattices of materials with different shear moduli and related properties showed high hardness. Later studies using High Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering led to low-temperature synthesis of low-stress, high hardness, fully dense ceramic alloy films employing metal-ion-assisted deposition. This is just a brief look at the work in this area over many decades.
Joe's legacy is one of incredibly high standards, significant impact in a wide range of thin film materials topics, longtime leadership in editorial areas, as well as the operation and growth of the relevant technical Societies. We miss Joe's leadership skills, his intuitive insight, his challenging comments, his cooperation, his humor, his mentoring abilities and encouragement, as well as his willingness to always pitch in when his help is required or is sought, and especially we will continue to miss his great friendship. We wish our best to his wife for 55 years, Phyllis Greene.
