Prof. Enrique Grünbaum

I will proceed now to describe our joint scientific work and relations. In 1995 we lost our dear friend and colleague Dr. Lev Margulis, who made several outstanding contributions to materials science using the meager electron microscopy facilities at the WIS of that period. The most outstanding discovery of his was the observation of the first inorganic nanotubes and fullerene-like nanoparticles of WS2 and MoS2 which were synthesized in my laboratory. Having lost an electron microscopist of this magnitude we were left like a flock without the shepherd. I invited Enrique to join our lab and he gladly supervised the departmental students in TEM. Upon my advice, my former student Yaron Rosenfeld-Hacohen tried to synthesize a new kind of nanotubes from the layered compound NiCl2. Working together, the two were able to find first evidence for the formation of these nanotubes. Enrique was very helpful in establishing the contacts with Oxford University Materials Laboratory and we joined forces with John Hutchison- the head of the electron microscopy lab in Oxford and his student Jeremy Sloan. Thus working together we have studied the structure of such nanotubes and could publish this work in Nature. This was the first of a series of studies we carried out jointly with the Oxford group, with Enrique serving as supervisor in these and future works. He remained in this capacity until his last days. His wisdom and knowledge helped me and my students to interpret many of our complex electron microscopy and electron diffraction data which was of key importance to our understanding of inorganic nanotubes.

We met in the fall of 1971, when Enrique came on alya from Chili and I from France, both of us having been offered a position by the late Yuval Ne’eman. We discovered that we had a common distant past, both of us having escaped from Germany shortly before the war broke out. May be this helped us to establish instantly a warm and effective relationship. At that time, the University did not provide startup money, which in a way forced us to define very carefully what we wanted to achieve. Enrique was already a well known Electron Microscopist – but he did not receive funds to buy an Electron Microscope, and was barely given access to that in use in the Faculty of Life Sciences. Nevertheless we quickly set out to start a research project of common interest. I was interested in the properties of recently discovered cermet composite thin films made of nanometer size aluminum grains in an oxide matrix. Understanding their special electronic properties required the fundamental knowledge of the grain size distribution. Enrique knew exactly how to do this, using dark field electron microscopy by which one could distinguish from a complex background grains diffracting in certain directions, and thus measure their size.

We started our work thanks to the help of an electron microscopist at Bar Ilan University (Max Herzberg) , who agreed to let Enrique use his microscope. Our work was successful and marked the beginning of modern experimental solid state physics and materials engineering at Tel Aviv University. Our initial publication is still quoted today.

Later we bought together a second hand electron (transmission) microscope that Enrique had located, and finally a scanning electron microscope. We shared lab space in the basement of the Physics building, after arrangements were made between the Deans of the Faculty of Exact Sciences and the Faculty of Engineering. This was interdisciplinary work before the name became fashionable. There followed many years of intense and fruitful collaboration. Enrique taught electron microscopy to several generations of graduate students. When the time came, two of them (Yossi Lereah and Zahava Barkay) were ready to hold key positions in a Materials Research Center whose establishment I and others proposed to the Wolfson Foundation. This proposal was successful. Later on the Wolfson Applied Materials Research Center, now equipped with modern microscopes, provided a solid foundation for the establishment of the Nano-Sciences Research Center at Tel Aviv University.

But the contributions of Enrique to the development of materials research in Israel go well beyond his work at Tel Aviv University. He was a founding member of the Israel Society for Microscopy and of the Israel Society for Vacuum Sciences. He was entirely dedicated to the development of electron microscopy and materials sciences in Israel, including the establishment of strong links with leading scientists abroad. He kept abreast of recent developments, attending seminars and visiting advanced laboratories broad. His help was very much appreciated at the Weizmann Institute where he spent one day per week in the laboratory of Reshef Tenne.

Enrique often spoke to us of his family, his children and grand-children, of which he was very proud. I wish to express to them our sorrow for the great loss they have suffered. They should know how much his work at Tel Aviv University has been extraordinarily important and successful. We will all miss him dearly.”