Nevill Francis Mott

Nevill Francis Mott married Ruth Eleanor Horder in 1930. They had two daughters and three grandchildren.

He died on 8 August 1996 following a brief illness, at the age of 90.

Nevill Francis Mott was born on 30 September 1905, in Leeds, England, to Lilian Mary Reynolds and Charles Francis Mott. His father was Senior Science Master at Giggleswick School and his mother also taught mathematics at the School.

As a little boy, he was educated at home by his mother. He began his formal education at the age of ten and started attending Clifton College in Bristol. He then proceeded to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and theoretical physics.

He began research under R.H. Fowler in Cambridge. He also researched under Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and Max Born in Göttingen.

Nevill Francis Mott was appointed a lecturer in the Physics Department at the University of Manchester in 1929. He stayed there for a year before returning to Cambridge as a fellow and lecturer of Gonville and Caius College in 1930.

In 1933, he became the Melville Wills Professor in Theoretical Physics at the University of Bristol. Having focused his initial research on the theoretical analysis of collisions in gases—notably the collision with spin flip of an electron against a hydrogen atom—he now became interested in the properties of metals and semiconductors as well.

At Bristol, he was deeply influenced by H. W. Skinner and H. Jones, and performed important works on the theory of transition metals, of rectification, hardness of alloys (with Nabarro) and of the photographic latent image (with Gurney).

His research in photographic emulsions led him to devise the theoretical description of the effect that light has on a photographic emulsion at the atomic level in 1938.

During the World War II, he spent a stint in London doing military research following which he became the Henry Overton Wills Professor of Physics and Director of the Henry Herbert Wills Physical Laboratory at Bristol in 1948. In this position he published several papers on low-temperature oxidation (with Cabrera) and the metal-insulator transition.

He formulated what became known as the Mott problem in quantum mechanics: a paradox that illustrates some of the difficulties of understanding the nature of wave function collapse and measurement.

He proposed the theory of Mott transition, a metal-nonmetal transition in condensed matter. This transition is known to exist in various systems: mercury metal vapor-liquid, metal NH3 solutions, transition metal chalcogenides and transition metal oxides.