John Boyd Page, a renowned theoretical physicist and teacher at Arizona State University (ASU), passed away in Tempe, Arizona, on 18 March 2023 at the age of 84, due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease. His groundbreaking work in theoretical condensed-matter physics—including his contributions to phonon, electron–phonon, and nonlinear interactions of perfect and defective crystals—coupled with his passionate dedication to teaching and mentorship at ASU made him a well-respected figure locally, nationally, and internationally.
John received his BS degree and obtained his PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Utah under the guidance of Gale Dick. After postdoc positions with Heinz Bilz at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, and Jim Krumhansl at Cornell University, John joined the physics faculty at ASU in 1969 as a founding member of the solid-state physics program. He retired in 2003.
John’s teaching was the stuff of legends among the graduate students as well as the many faculty who sat in on his classes when we really wanted to understand a subject deeply. He consistently scored the highest teaching evaluations in the department and was recognized with the Dean’s Award for teaching, an award usually limited to undergraduate teachers. He was a perfectionist who left no loose ends in his explanations, a style that drove his research. He taught many-body methods in his graduate quantum mechanics classes, becoming an expert in the process.
John applied those many-body methods to the problem of resonance Raman scattering. The photon–phonon interaction is weak, but not so when the illumination is in resonance with an optical absorption. In that case, perturbation approaches fail. Together with David Tonks, John developed an exact time correlator formalism, work that had a profound impact on the interpretation of resonance Raman scattering and charge transfer reactions. In 1990 he was awarded fellowship in the American Physical Society for that work.
John’s group-theory classes were in high demand too. So when Don Huffman at the University of Arizona produced solid carbon-60 in the late 1980s, John was ready with an analysis of the Raman spectra, going on to publish a series of highly cited papers on the optical properties of fullerenes.
Of John’s many research areas, three included pioneering studies at the crossroads of defect modes in harmonic crystals and the disorder and localized dynamics in strongly anharmonic periodic systems. Although it is not surprising that the loss of periodicity in defect crystals leads to localized vibrational phenomena at the defect site, a surprise was his discovery of “pocket modes,” where the maximum vibrational amplitude is not at the lattice impurity but rather is localized at lattice sites well removed from that impurity.
Similarly, focusing his attention on the electromagnetic response of small disordered particles, and using only sum rules and causality to introduce a specific electric and magnetic moment representation for characterizing the dynamics, John discovered the analogue of the single crystal Lyddane-Sachs-Teller relation—namely, that a simple connection exists between the electrodynamic and static dielectric properties of the disordered particle. Surprisingly, the moments have the same form as that previously identified with single crystal vibrational mode behavior.
Finally, the dynamics of defect-free periodic lattices described in terms of plane-wave phonons is so deeply ingrained in many fields that it was another surprise to researchers when John argued quite generally, and successfully, that strong anharmonicity in perfect crystals is sufficient to produce a new class of “intrinsic localized modes.” His paper on localized vibrational modes in anharmonic systems in Physical Review B has been cited more than 500 times.
John was great company too. A lifelong outdoorsman, John was a hunter and fly fisherman with a passion for the American West. One of us remembers a Sonoran Desert hike he organized for new grad students. While the group was taking a rest, a bird started calling. John said that it was the call of the canyon wren. A magical moment, and canyon wrens a perpetual reminder of John.
He was also a talented guitarist, winning a high-school competition with his rendition of “Folsom Prison Blues” and going on to become an excellent jazz guitarist. We played together for more than 30 years as The Moondogs, an all-physicist band at ASU. It was fun for all of us to see this eminent theoretical physicist rock the house, though his perfectionist streak meant that wrong notes were quickly called out.
John is greatly missed by his friends, colleagues, and the many graduate students who learned from a master.
Obituaries are published as a service to the physical sciences community and are not commissioned by Physics Today. Submissions are lightly edited before publication. Click here for guidelines on submitting an obituary. If you are a copyright holder who thinks that an obituary violates your copyright, please contact us.
