Geoffrey Vickers Marr was born on 30 January 1930 in County Durham, UK, and educated at Darlington Queen Elizabeth Grammar School and the University of Manchester, where he studied physics under Patrick Blackett. As a postgraduate at the University of Reading, Geoff worked on the photoionization of metal vapors under the supervision of R. W. Ditchburn at the University of Reading. This set the direction for much of Geoff’s subsequent research on fundamentals of photoionization in the extreme UV region.
Geoff moved into industry with the Atomic Power Division of English Electric at Leicester. In 1961 he was invited back to Reading by Ditchburn and resumed work on atomic photoionization cross sections and autoionization. In the following years, he built up his research group at Reading, also returning to Canada for spells as visiting professor at the universities of Western Ontario and York, Toronto, where he carried out work on the spectroscopy of small molecules.
In the early 1960s the continuum sources used for extreme UV absorption/photoionization spectroscopy were limited, with many unwanted emission lines and poor shot-to-shot reproducibility. The Glasgow synchrotron became the UK’s first synchrotron radiation facility, and it wasn’t long before Geoff and Keith Codling at Reading were making the very first measurements on photoelectron (partial photoionization) cross sections and angular distributions for the rare gases.
In 1967, quite independently, Ian Munro and Scott Hamilton at Manchester University’s physics department submitted a proposal to the Synchrotron Radiation Center to establish a user facility at the new national 5 GeV electron synchrotron NINA at Daresbury Laboratory. Joining together with Geoff, they obtained funding to construct a Synchrotron Radiation Facility at NINA, and in 1971 Geoff’s efforts at SRF were recognized by the award of a DSc by the University of Manchester. Geoff and Munro organized the world’s first International Symposium for Synchrotron Radiation Users, held at Daresbury in 1973. Geoff served as Chairman of the SRF Users Committee for many years. At the same time, he supervised many Reading postgraduate and postdoctoral research assistants. The Reading physics department was intimately involved in the design of custom-built spectrometers that were coupled to beam lines.
Following the closure of NINA in 1977, Geoff was able to negotiate the use of the Bonn synchrotron. Then the Synchrotron Radiation Source, a 2 GeV storage ring purpose built for synchrotron radiation users, began operation in 1980 at Daresbury. He held the post of chairman of the SRS Atomic and Molecular Users Committee, and he was very influential in the development of the new source.
In 1981 Geoff took up the post of professor of natural philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, succeeding Reginald Victor Jones, who had held the post since 1946. With the new research activities that Geoff brought to Aberdeen, increasingly featuring synchrotron radiation instrumentation alongside atomic and molecular physics, it appeared that this new position would reinvigorate the department and prove a high point in Geoff’s career. New lines of research on soft x-ray optics and materials characterization were commenced, and new equipment for multilayer x-ray optical coatings was procured to support them. In 1986 he was elected to fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
But these were difficult times. The university was threatened, sacrifices were needed, and it was decided that Natural Philosophy would no longer be permitted to support research. In 1989 Geoff took early retirement, retaining a part-time position to continue work on projects related to growth and synchrotron radiation–based characterization of thin films.
In retirement, Geoff remained active in the international synchrotron radiation community, before in later years ill health took its toll. His former students and members of his research group remember him for his unfailing encouragement and support, his ability to realize where an individual’s strengths lay, and to ensure that they had the opportunity to use them to best effect. His scientific legacy includes a wide body of published work on atomic and molecular spectroscopy, photoionization, and synchrotron radiation instrumentation; respected monographs on photoionization processes in gases (1967), plasma spectroscopy (1968), and synchrotron radiation (1987); and above all his prominent and internationally recognized contributions to the emergence of synchrotron radiation as a major scientific tool in physics, biology, and materials science. He died on 16 May 2017 and is survived by his wife, Jean, and his children, Richard, Peter, and Catherine.
