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John Clifford Woolley, Emeritus Professor, Physics Department ,  University of Ottawa, passed away last May 21st, 2011, in his 91st year.  

Born and educated in England, he obtained his B.A. degree at Cambridge University in 1942 and a PhD degree at the University of Nottingham in 1950.  During the War he was a Research Officer in the Admiralty Signal Establishment from 1942 to 1947. For the following 16 years he was successively Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at the University of Nottingham.  There, his research was centered on Magnetism where he is known in particular to have done seminal work on magnetic viscosity, developing a general analysis based on an activation energy concept. He conducted a series of measurements on specimens of Alnico in good agreement with the basic theoretical model using a primitive magnetometer method at various temperatures within the range -187 C to 250C. This was published in 1949 in a paper which has been and is still currently quoted as the reference in this field.

In 1963 he left England and moved to the University of Ottawa as an Associate Professor and was promoted Full Professor in 1964, a position he held until his retirement in 1986. When John Robson, who was the chairman of the Physics Department moved to McGill University, in 1968,  John Woolley took over that position for the next 6 years.   

When John came to Ottawa he decided to switch from the field of magnetism to that of semiconductors.  He saw there a new, exciting field of research and became a pioneer in the study of III-V alloy semiconductors.

Before leaving England he had already designed a laboratory dedicated to semiconductor studies, to be installed in the new Physics building being opened.  He built a large facility to grow the material in ingot form over complete ranges of its constituting alloy elements. Some of his numerous furnaces were still in use until very recently.

He held the largest grant in the Department for many years, supervised some 50 graduate students, wrote and published over 180 papers.  With his students he obtained and analyzed the phase diagrams of these materials, studied their crystalline structures from their X-ray spectra as well as their electrical and optical properties. He was not overly concerned with practical applications, but soon a large number of researchers were: semiconductor alloys are now grown in 3- and 2-d (quantum wells, super lattices) and 0-d (quantum dots) form and are used in numerous devices from computer memories to solar cells.

Long after his retirement from teaching and graduate supervision and until five years ago, he continued to collaborate closely with a group of researchers including Anne-Marie and Gilles Lamarche as well as Miguel Quintero (Venezuela) on magnetic and semi-magnetic semiconductor alloys that they started to investigate around 1980. Some of these alloys had interesting magnetic structure in the low temperature range studied with SQUID magnetometers and elucidated with complete analysis of their neutron diffraction spectra obtained at Chalk River.

Throughout his life, John had a variety of interests including bird watching throughout the world, stamp collecting and an appreciation for a wide range of music. On one occasion during a semiconductor conference in Warsaw, Poland, in the summer 1977, he was arrested by military police for taking pictures of birds in a forest near the Conference site. That forest was next to a non-signaled military base.

John will be remembered by his many students, friends and colleagues as a modest man with a penetrating intellect and with many accomplishments.

Emery Fortin, University of Ottawa

Gilles Lamarche, University of Ottawa