Fisl NeutronOptics - Who is Alan Hewat?

Who is Alan Hewat ?

In 2007 Alan Hewat retired from the ILL in Grenoble France to establish NeutronOptics. For 13 years he had lead the Neutron Diffraction group, the largest of 5 instrument groups at the Institute Laue-Langevin (ILL) which operates the European high flux reactor, the world's most powerful neutron source. Alan is referenced on Google Scholar.

He holds an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Melbourne, Australia (Queen's College), plus an honorary Ph.D. in Chemistry and the Linnaeus Medal from Uppsala University, Sweden. He has acted as an International Atomic Energy Agency expert in Vienna and in several countries including China and South Korea, and lectured in almost every country working with neutron scattering - in particular, the United States, Canada, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and most European countries.

From 1961 he worked as a student at the Australian Atomic Energy reactor in Sydney, and before moving to France in 1973 was a Scientific Fellow at the UK Atomic Energy Authority in Oxfordshire. He later worked for a sabbatical year in 1984 at the UK pulsed neutron source ISIS when it was first commissioned. He was recruited to ILL by R.L. Mossbauer (Nobel laureate) when the UK joined the European community and at the same time the European high flux reactor, as one of the first "British" scientists in Grenoble.

Alan has published over 400 scientific papers and book chapters. His most cited scientific work was on the structure and superconductivity of ceramic perovskites, in particular YBa2Cu3O7, helping establish with Bell labs the idea of charge transfer between superconducting and electron doping layers, which lead to the discovery of new layered ceramic superconductors, with even higher transition temperatures. These two papers are among the ILL's most cited publications, attracting more than 2000 citations.

His 1970 Ph.D. thesis under J.M. Cowley was on Lattice Dynamics, with external examiner B. Brockhouse (Nobel laureate). After lecturing at RMIT he joined BTM Willis at the UK AERE Harwell where he developed Rietveld's method of powder profile refinement. He showed how the method could be used to study structural transitions in perovskites and hydrogenous materials, which had a significant impact on inorganic chemistry.

He has long had an interest in scientific instrumentation and computing, programming tables of thermodynamic functions in Fortran-II on one of the first IBM mainframe's in 1961. At ILL Grenoble he originated the first practical mylar foil Soller collimators now used throughout the world, increasing the intensity of collimated neutrons, and proposed using a bank of such collimators for an efficient high resolution powder diffractometer. He subsequently built the D1A and D2B neutron powder diffractometers that have become models for similar machines throughout the world, showing how multiple linear position detectors could be used to correct for line broadening due to vertical divergence, and how the individual detectors could be automatically calibrated and summed to produce a single powder profile. He also helped define the HRPD time-of-flight neutron diffractometer at ISIS with Sir Brian Fender, as well as single crystal machines at ILL, in particular those using large 2D detectors and CCD cameras. In 1995 he initiated the WWW interface to the world's Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD), making it easy to search for known inorganic structures, calculate their powder patterns, and display them in 3D using the Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML), which he later replaced with JMOL.

As Diffraction Instrument Group Leader, he helped obtain a £20 million UK-EPSRC "Millenium" grant with UK University leaders to build or re-build 5 ILL instruments - the Super-D2B powder diffractometer, D4C a microstrip detector for liquids and amorphous materials, the SALSA strain scanner, a dedicated lab. to study the mechanical properties of engineering materials using neutron strain scanning, and a 2D detector D19 for the study of protein and fibre diffraction. A rebuild of the D20 high flux PSD powder diffractometer, and the LADI NIP Laue detector were also funded. Many of these instruments influenced the program at the new Australian Research Reactor, OPAL. The CYCLOPS neutron Laue diffractometer using a 4pi CCD-array was also funded, but the DRACULA proposal for a diffractometer for high pressure and small samples, was unsuccessful. This idea has finally been resurrected as the Spanish EXTREME-D CRG instrument at ILL.

Before retiring from ILL, Alan developed a simple compact CCD neutron camera, to replace the Polaroid neutron camera that had been used until then for sample alignment; he constructed such cameras for most of ILL's instruments. This potentially saved much wasted beam time by ensuring that the neutron beam was well focussed on the sample. This initiative lead to the NeutronOptics spin-off company in 2007.

Alan is married to Elizabeth (E.A. Hewat), a fellow student from Melbourne who obtained her doctorate in Physics from Oxford, and who until recently worked for the Institut de Biologie Structurale (CEA) in Grenoble. They have three children, Dr Alison, Marcus and Peter, and six grandchildren, who live in Grenoble, Paris and London. Other interests include being elected President of his local housing association, hiking in the mountains and family history; his gg.grandfather John H. was an early settler in Australia, and his gggg.grandfather Andrew H. was expelled from America and his property confiscated for being on the wrong side of the revolution!
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Most cited publications

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Including a Personal Account of the History of ILL