Mott, Sir Nevill (1905-1996), a British physicist, was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize for physics for his work in explaining the properties of both magnetic materials and amorphous materials—that is, materials such as glass, whose atoms are not arranged in an orderly way, as in crystals. Mott also made huge contributions to many other areas of the physics of solid materials, including the chemical processes in photographic film. He shared the Nobel Prize with American physicists Philip W. Anderson and John H. Van Vleck, who had independently worked in related fields.
Nevill Francis Mott was born in Leeds, England, to parents who were both physicists. He studied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University and conducted research there, in Denmark, in Germany, and at Manchester University in England. He then returned to a lectureship in Cambridge, where he worked on nuclear physics in the laboratory of the great New Zealand-born physicist Ernest Rutherford (see Rutherford, Ernest ).
In 1933, Mott became professor of theoretical physics at the University of Bristol, where he studied metals and semiconductors (materials of limited electrical conductivity), which are crucial to electronic technology. He developed theories on diverse topics, including the hardness of alloys and the way in which an image is registered in photographic film.
During World War II (1939-1945), Mott contributed to the British war effort with research on explosives and an analysis of Royal Air Force (RAF) photographs to find out as much as possible about the performance of German V-2 rocket-bombs. After the war, he headed the physics department at Bristol, where he continued to study electrical and other properties of solid materials.
In 1954, Mott became Cavendish professor of experimental physics at the University of Cambridge. This was where he did his Nobel Prize-winning research, from about 1965. He studied glassy, materials, also called amorphous materials, in which the atoms are not positioned in a regular pattern. Such a material can sometimes behave like an electrical insulator (a nonconducting material), sometimes like a conductor. He produced a theory of the transitions—now called Mott transitions—between these two states. He opened up the use of such materials in electronic devices in place of the more expensive crystalline semiconductors, such as silicon and germanium.
Mott officially retired in 1971, but he continued active research at Cambridge and at Imperial College, London, in the field of the electrical properties of noncrystalline materials. Toward the end of his life, he worked on the newly discovered “high-temperature” superconductors, materials that lose all electrical resistance when cooled to about –170 °C.
Mott was keenly interested in education and was president of the International Union of Physics from 1951 to 1957. He was interested in the history of religion and in 1991 edited a book entitled Can Scientists Believe? He was knighted in 1962. His autobiography, A Life in Science, was published in 1986.
