James Robert Anderson, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park, died on 25 March 2018 at the age of 85 after a short hospitalization. He was known to everyone as Bob Anderson, or Bob.
Bob was born and raised in Iowa. His father, Ernest W. Anderson, was a professor of mathematics and aerospace engineering at Iowa State University in Ames. His mother, Florence, was an English teacher. Bob greatly enjoyed teaching and was well liked by his students. He loved telling jokes, and he loved puns. He was an avid bicycler. He was a stickler for proper English grammar in his writing, and he often tortured his graduate students over their bad grammar. Bob and his wife, Nancy, had one son, David.
Bob’s research career fell into three phases. The first phase was using the de Haas–van Alphen (dHvA) effect to measure the Fermi surface of transition metals. Bob and his collaborators and students were part of a large effort from the 1930s to the 1970s to measure the Fermi surface of metals and compare the results with single-particle band structure calculations. Bob studied the dHvA effect in lead under his thesis adviser, A. V. Gold, at Iowa State University and received a PhD for this work in 1962. He then went to the Mond Laboratory at Cambridge University on an NSF postdoctoral fellowship. On the basis of his Fermi surface work, he was recruited in 1967 by John Toll to become an assistant physics professor at the University of Maryland. He remained there for the next 51 years.
At Maryland, Bob worked on a variety of transition metals including lead, bismuth, indium, and also the ferromagnetic metals iron, cobalt, and nickel. The Fermi surfaces of the transition metals can contain many pieces, and as a result the dHvA oscillations become very hard to interpret. Bob and his graduate students Don Hines, John Hudak, and Peter Heinmann worked on determining the Fermi surfaces of these systems. His collaborators included Dennis Stone of the Lab for Physical Sciences, Jim Schirber of Sandia Labs, as well as others. To compare his results with theory, he also worked on energy band calculations with Dimitri Papaconstantopoulos of George Mason University and with his graduate student Bill Johnson. He also conducted dHvA measurements of metals under pressure.
The second phase of Bob’s research occurred during the 1980s and 1990s, when he studied transport and magnetic properties of semiconductor alloys. The alloys he studied included the semimagnetic semiconductors, such as the narrow-gap HgMnTe and the wide-gap CdMnSe. Among his collaborators were Dennis Stone, Dave Kreft, Jacek Furdyna, and his graduate students Johnson and Ramesh Mani. Bob also studied other semiconductor alloys, such as HgCdTe and AlGaAs, with his postdoc Lamya Ghenim and his graduate students Bill Beck, Arnie Goldberg, and C. R. Lu.
The third phase of Bob’s research concerned quantum computing. Bob worked on superconducting qubits with his collaborators Fred Wellstood and Chris Loeb at Maryland. Bob was in his seventies and eighties in this period. He co-advised graduate students with Fred and Chris and contributed his experimental knowledge to guide the experiments. He made significant contributions to the superconducting quantum computing research at Maryland. He continued teaching into his eighties until illness forced him to stop. He continued faithfully attending departmental talks until a few weeks before the end.
Bob usually traveled every summer to visit and work at other laboratories throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. He collaborated with Malgorzata Gorska, Robert Galazka, Jacek Kossut, and others at the Institute of Physics in the Polish Academy of Sciences, where he worked on semimagnetic semiconductors. He learned Russian and collaborated with Nikolaj Brandt, Yaroslav Ponomarev, and others at the Institute of High Pressure Physics at Moscow State University. Bob also took Nancy and David on a sabbatical to Moscow. He subsequently learned Japanese while he worked with G. Kido, Y. Nishina, and others at the high magnetic field laboratory at the Institute for Materials Research at Tohoku University.
Bob traveled widely and worked with many scientists. He will be missed by all for his experimental skill and his uniformly cheerful, optimistic, and can-do attitude.
