Biography - Arthur J. Schultz

Arthur J. Schultz received the ACA’s 2022 Robert Bau Neutron Diffraction Award. This award recognizes “exceptional research achievement in neutron diffraction.”

In the early 1980s, under Art’s able leadership, the Single Crystal Diffractometer (SCD) at the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS) at Argonne was developed. This was the first of its kind, a single-crystal diffractometer based on time-of-flight (ToF) neutron diffraction. For many years it was one of only two single-crystal neutron diffraction facilities in the U.S. that were generally available to the scientific community. For much of its lifetime at IPNS, this instrument was the only reliably available single-crystal ToF diffractometer in North America. By paying extreme attention to detail in experiments, Art firmly established that the ToF Laue technique could match monochromatic measurements in accuracy, while having the tremendous advantage of greater speed and higher resolution.

Some of Art’s earliest research continued Robert Bau’s pioneering work describing the M-H bond in transition metal hydrides, primarily with neutron diffraction. He extended this work in a number of seminal publications on transition-metal sigma-complexes in which two electrons in an X-H sigma-bond (X = H, B, C and Si) form a dative bond with a transition metal.

He also contributed significantly by describing temperature and pressure effects on cooperative Jahn-Teller distortions and by studies of organic and high Tc superconductors. He proposed many of the collaborative research projects that were undertaken using SCD, extending the neutron user community to include many researchers who would not otherwise have found their way to the technique. He has been an effective mentor to many scientists, as an organizer or co-organizer of sessions at ACA meetings, Transactions Symposia, and workshops, and as a lecturer in many of the National Schools on Neutron and X-Ray Scattering.

Just before and after the IPNS shutdown in 2008, Art continued his work in instrument development at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He worked with SNS instrument scientists to develop TOPAZ, a single-crystal diffractometer. Later this same collaboration resulted in another SNS instrument, MaNDi, a macromolecular single-crystal diffractometer. MaNDi is currently the world’s most capable macromolecular neutron diffractometer.

Over the course of his illustrious career, Art has pioneered the development of time-of-flight (ToF) single-crystal neutron diffraction methods, has made numerous seminal discoveries exploiting the powerful ToF technique, and has helped grow the worldwide neutron diffraction community.