Eric Fawcett

Eric Fawcett (August 23, 1927 – September 2, 2000), was a professor of physics at the University of Toronto for 23 years. He also co-founded Science for Peace.

Academic and Professional Life

Fawcett began his prestigious career in physics with a full scholarship to the University of Cambridge. After graduation, he crossed the Atlantic to take up a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Research Council in Ottawa in 1954. Two years later Fawcett returned to England, where he worked at the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern. In 1961 he moved to the United States and worked as a research physicist at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. In 1970, he accepted a Professorship in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto, where he remained until his retirement in 1993.

Besides first observing cyclotron resonance in metals, Fawcett is credited with discovering the Hall effect in type-II superconductors. While he used many different experimental techniques over his career, including neutron scattering, magnetostriction was a technique that Fawcett especially developed as an effective probe of magnetism in metals and alloys.