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Prof. Albert Furrer : 'A dedicated scientist does not really retire...'
A great specialist of neutron scattering, Prof. Albert Furrer will receive the Walter Hälg Prize awarded by the ENSA in a few weeks [read here]. Like Prof. Hans Rudolf Ott did in the last issue [read here], he kindly accepted to answer our special set of questions to 'pseudo-retired' MaNEP professors...

You are officially retired since the end of November 2004. Will you still continue your action within MaNEP during the 2nd phase, and if so, how do you envisage your contribution ?
I will no longer be active as a project leader, but will try to provide relevant contributions in cooperation with colleagues at PSI to some of the projects defined for the 2nd phase. Another link to MaNEP is my work in the industrial company SwissNeutronics which joined MaNEP one year ago.

What would you consider your greatest scientific achievements since the beginning of your career ?
My scientific work was always related to neutron scattering. Thus I always chose novel topics which can be best studied by this technique. In the late sixties, I performed the first neutron spectroscopic experiments to determine the crystal-field levels in metallic rare-earth compounds, which later became a standard technique.

In the late seventies I started - together with my colleague H.U. Güdel, at the University of Berne - studies of isolated clusters of magnetic ions. We found that the Heisenberg Hamiltonian is an incredibly simplified description of the exchange coupling, and although it is widely and successfully used to parametrize the dynamic properties of magnetic materials, it is merely a phenomenological approach and does not reflect the true nature of the exchange interaction. We laid the theoretical and experimental background for the field of magnetic molecular compounds which today is considered to be one of the hot topics in magnetochemistry and in applied magnetism.

In the late eighties we demonstrated that the phenomenon of high-temperature superconductivity of underdoped cuprates is an inhomogeneous materials property, thus the onset of superconductivity is the result of a percolation mechanism. Moreover, by studying isotope and pressure effects in cuprates we could demonstrate the importance of lattice fluctuations for the pairing mechanism.

In the late nineties I focused my interests on quantum spin systems, and we could verify for the first time the picture of Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons in the quantum-spin dimer compound TlCuCl3, and thereby established a novel magnetic state of matter.

Since the creation of MaNEP in 2001, do you think collaborations between Swiss researchers have been boosted ? Could we do better and if so… how ?
Out of my 400 publications in refereed journals there are just three papers with my name as single author, which means that I always performed my scientific work in cooperation with colleagues from other institutes. Fruitful cooperations are only possible when the partners have the same interests and – most importantly – the same “chemistry” or “wavelength”. Regarding my own work, MaNEP contributed to make existing collaborations more visible to the outside. In my opinion, the aim of MaNEP’s cooperation programs should not be so much to force scientists to cooperate, but to provide excellent boundary conditions for such collaborations.

How do you explain the small number of students chosing studies in physics ? What should be done to improve this situation ?
I do not worry about the small number of physics students (this is anyway not the case at ETH Zurich). I would worry if the quality of the students would decrease, but through all my career I was privileged to be able to attract students with the best qualifications (e.g., top 10% in examinations).

If you had to bet on the the discovery of superconductors at room Tc, how far in time would that be ? Would you bet on a Swiss research team ?
I have the same point of view as James Bond : Never say never ! One cannot predict breakthroughs in physics. They just occur when ingenuity and intuition are coupled to produce ideas away from the commonly accepted lines (the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity by Alex Müller and Georg Bednorz is exemplary). There are people with ingenuity and intuition within MaNEP, so I would certainly bet on a Swiss team.

And finally… what does ‘retired’ Prof. Furrer do with his spare time ?
First of all, a dedicated scientist does not really retire, but continues to contribute to science as before, maybe with a slightly reduced pace (again, Alex Müller is exemplary). The advantage of retired scientists is that they can now do what they like to do most and not what they have to do (due to their position). So I will continue my research on quantum spin systems with colleagues - mainly at PSI - who like to work with me, and I will explore new research ideas in several other fields. In addition, I am engaged in optimizing and economizing the work done at MaNEP’s partner company SwissNeutronics, as well as in contributing to opinions and decisions in many international advisory, expert, selection and steering committees. Nevertheless, I will also enjoy increasingly activities outside science both in culture (classical music by playing the flute), in sports (swimming, biking, skiing), and in my leisure time (I do not mind to watch a thriller or a football match on the TV).