Professor Sir Alexander Marian Bradshaw CBE FRS Hon.FInstP (1944-2024)

_{Image credit: TU München} 

Professor Sir Alexander Bradshaw was a physicist known for his research in surface science and molecular spectroscopy. His pioneering work in plasma physics, photoelectron diffraction, and atomic and molecular photoionisation using synchrotron radiation has left a lasting mark on the scientific community.

Born in 1944 in Bushey, England, he went on to study chemistry at the University of London and took his PhD in 1969 in physical chemistry, leading to him being awarded the German Habilitation (university doctorate) in 1974 at the Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Technical University of Munich.

From 1976-1998 he worked at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin, and from 1980 onwards as scientific member and director. Parallel to his position at the Fritz Haber Institute, he was also, during the 1980s, scientific director of the Berlin synchrotron radiation source BESSY and from 1999-2008 the scientific director of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics.

In his first period at the Fritz Haber Institute, he specialised in spectroscopic and structural characterisation of adsorbed atoms and molecules, using vibrational spectroscopy and photoemission. In cooperation with the physics department at the University of Warwick the technique of quantitative photoelectron diffraction using synchrotron radiation was introduced and applied extensively.

He also worked on instrumentation development, including for synchrotron radiation experiments and more recently concentrated on photoionisation phenomena in free molecules and clusters.

Alexander played a leading role in the development and application of several surface techniques, including reflection – infrared absorption spectroscopy, angle-resolved photoemission and quantitative photoelectron diffraction. He performed the first high-resolution soft X-ray photoionisation experiments on free molecules, opening up new fields of research.

He was a Fellow of The Royal Society and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech), the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Academia Europaea, as well as an Honorary Professor of experimental physics at the Technical University of Munich. The University of London awarded him an honorary DSc.

From 1998-2000 he was president of the German Physical Society (DPG) and co-initiator in 2000 of the first German national “science year” Jahr der Physik, and was an honorary life member of the DPG, an Honorary Fellow of the IOP and a Fellow of the European Physical Society.

Throughout his career, he was committed to advancing understanding of future energy supply and sustainability and had more than 450 research papers published.

A member of numerous national and international evaluation panels, he chaired EU committees on large-scale facilities and nuclear fusion and was a cofounder and the first editor-in-chief of one of the first open-access journals, the New Journal of Physics.

Alexander received many prizes, including the Max Planck Research Prize in 1994, for his research, for his services to the physics community, and for his work at the science policy level, leading him to being awarded the German Bundesverdienstkreuz in 2002 and a CBE in 2007.

Alexander died on 10 October 2024.

Thanks to The Royal Society, the Fritz Haber Institute and the Max Planck Institute for the biographical information.