Bau Neutron Diffraction Award: Arthur J. Schultz (2022)

Art J. Schultz, Emeritus Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and Scientific R&D Services and Consultant, Spallation Neutron Source, Oak Ridge National laboratory, is the recipient of the ACA’s 2022 Robert Bau Neutron Diffraction Award.  This award recognizes “exceptional research achievement in neutron diffraction.”  Art is unique in his ability to bring together the strong chemical and x-ray structural determination background that originated in his Ph.D studies with Richard Eisenberg and the evolution of this into all aspects of neutron scattering and instrumentation.

Art spent essentially his entire career at Argonne National Laboratory.  Some of Art’s earliest work centered on continuing Robert Bau’s pioneering work on describing the M-H bond by studying transition metal hydrides, primarily with neutron diffraction.   He extended this work in a number of seminal publications on activated sigma complexes.  He has also contributed significantly by describing temperature and pressure effects on cooperative Jahn-Teller distortions and by studies of organic and high T_c   superconductors  and other magnetic materials. 

In the early 1980s, under Art’s able leadership, the Single Crystal Diffractometer (SCD) at the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS) at Argonne was developed.  This was the first of its kind, a single-crystal diffractometer based on time-of-flight (ToF) neutron diffraction.  For many years it was one of only two single-crystal neutron diffraction facilities in the U.S. that were generally available to the scientific community.  And, for much of its lifetime at IPNS, this instrument was the only reliably available single-crystal ToF diffractometer in North America.  By paying extreme attention to detail in experiments, Art firmly established that the ToF Laue technique could match monochromatic measurements in accuracy and still have the tremendous advantage of speed and resolution.

Developing a first-of-its-kind, principle-establishing diffractometer could have been a career-defining achievement for many scientists but Art did much more, nurturing the applications of SCD in frontier research.  He proposed many of the collaborative research projects that were undertaken using SCD, extending the neutron user community to include many researcher who would not otherwise have found their way to the technique.  He has been an effective mentor to many scientists and has been an organizer or co-organizer of sessions at ACA meetings, of Transactions Symposia, and of workshops and been a lecturer in many of the National Schools on Neutron and X-Ray Scattering.

Just before and after the IPNS shutdown in 2008, Art continued his work in instrument development at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS).  He led an Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) team that cooperated with SNS instrument scientist to develop TOPAZ, a single-crystal diffractometer, and to conceive of and develop funding for another SNS instrument, MaNDi, a macromolecular single-crystal diffractometer.  MaNDi is currently the world’s most capable macromolecular neutron diffractometer.

Over the course of his illustrious career, Art has pioneered the development of time-of-flight (ToF) single-crystal neutron diffraction methods, has made numerous seminal discoveries exploiting the powerful ToF technique and has helped develop the worldwide neutron diffraction community.