Editorial: Steve Buckman - 40 years of pushing leptons uphill

Abstract

Professor Stephen Buckman has had a lasting impact on the field of low energy electron and positron collisions, having made a career of high precision measurement of scattering cross sections, and developing many different experimental techniques to do so. Graduating from his PhD under the supervision of Professor Peter Teubner at Flinders University in 1979, Steve went on to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manchester and then JILA, at the University of Colorado, before moving to the Australian National University where he worked for the majority of his scientific career. His time in Adelaide, Manchester and Boulder gave him a grounding in the techniques of measuring single electron scattering processes, as distinct from the swarm measurements which were used to measure bulk properties of electron transport and infer the scattering cross sections from that information. He was recruited to the Australian National University by Professors Bob Crompton and Malcolm Elford, who were giants in the field of swarm measurements, to start an experimental program of low energy electron scattering. This in itself revealed remarkable foresight, not only in recruiting such an eminently suitable candidate, but also in recognizing that it was time to move the Department into a new direction, which would prove to be an area of great scientific fertility.