Richard E. Norberg was an innovator in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), with a productive research career spanning more than 50 years. He died 20 April 2010 in Saint Louis, Missouri, after a brief period of declining health.
Dick was born on 28 December 1922 and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He attended DePauw University before serving as a US Army Air Forces meteorologist in Europe from 1942 to 1946; he received a chemistry AB, in absentia, from DePauw in 1943. In 1951 he received his PhD in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was in the group of students working under Charles Slichter. Illinois was an intense and exciting place and time in the development of NMR, with new results appearing rapidly. Others in the Illinois effort who became leaders in NMR include Al Overhauser, Herb Gutowsky, Erwin Hahn, Myer Bloom, Don Holcomb, and Tom Carver. Dick’s work at Illinois included, with Holcomb, a groundbreaking relaxation-time study of atomic motion in solid lithium and sodium and the first NMR study of a metal hydride, a field with continuing activity today.
Dick moved to Washington University in Saint Louis (WU) in 1954 to work with George Pake. He quickly rose to professor and became department chairman in 1962, serving in that role for 29 years. He was a thoughtful and caring chairman, taking relish in doing things the right way (that is, his way) and maneuvering around bureaucratic hurdles. One of his methods was to take individuals into his confidence and warn them, “If you ever breathe a word of this….” But years later, comparing notes, we discovered the inner circle was quite large—we weren’t so special after all! Most of all, Dick devoted himself to the prosperity of WU physics.
Dick was very active in research, even with his administrative duties. He and his first student, Irving Lowe, showed the fundamental link between continuous wave NMR response, which was then the standard method, and the response to pulse excitation, the standard today. For large-angle pulses, the relationship is not obvious and depends on the high spin-temperature approximation. That relationship is at the core of modern Fourier transform NMR, as Richard Ernst noted in his 1991 Nobel Prize address. Dick and Lowe also reported magic-angle spinning NMR at the same time that Jesse Beams and E. Raymond Andrew, independently, were doing similar work. That method—with high-speed sample rotation time-averaging to zero the dipolar and other spin interactions—is now the foundation of high-resolution NMR in solids. For their work, Dick and Lowe received the 2004 ISMAR Prize from the International Society for Magnetic Resonance.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Dick and his students analyzed the solid and liquid rare gases. For example, with Bruce Sirovich, he followed the rate of self-diffusion in solid neon as a function of temperature over nine decades, surely a record. Dick assigned to one of us (Conradi) the study of dilute molecular H2 in the rare-gas solids, an examination that seemed then to have strictly academic interest. But shortly thereafter, when the study of hydrogenated amorphous silicon became important, Dick correctly deduced that molecular H2—and not two-level tunneling systems—controlled the spin relaxation time in amorphous silicon, despite the claim that there was no H2 present. Starting with another of us (Leopold), Dick’s group studied amorphous silicon by hydrogen and especially deuterium NMR. In deuterium NMR, the several species or flavors of bonded D atoms and D2 molecules were readily separated in spectra and relaxation curves. During that period, his fruitful collaboration with Peter Fedders blossomed, with Fedders developing theoretical explanations for Dick’s data.
Dick’s other great loves, besides his family and physics, were the outdoors and opera. He was willing, even happy, to suffer so he could be out in nature. Seeing a photo of Dick in the Boundary Waters canoe area in Ontario, Canada, covered in netting against biting black flies, a student asked, “Is that fun?” Dick’s response was immediate, “You think I’d do this if it weren’t?” Dick had a huge collection of 78-rpm sound recordings of opera and made annual pilgrimages to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
As a teacher of the university’s modern physics course, Dick loved showing how many physical phenomena could be explained with a few basic principles. He infected his students with that attitude. He also took great pride in the 49 students he directed toward a PhD and was highly supportive of their careers. His students, WU physics, and the field of NMR owe him and will miss him.
