TY - JOUR
AU - Miret-Arts, Salvador
AB - It has been a privilege and a real pleasure to organize this special issue or festschrift in the general field of atom-surface scattering (and its interaction) in honor of J R Manson. This is a good opportunity and an ideal place to express our deep gratitude to one of the leaders in this field for his fundamental and outstanding scientific contributions. J R Manson, or Dick to his friends and colleagues, is one of the founding fathers, together with N Cabrera and V Celli, of the 'Theory of surface scattering and detection of surface phonons'. This is the title of the very well-known first theoretical paper by Dick published in Physical Review Letters in 1969.My first meeting with Dick was around twenty years ago in Saclay. J Lapujoulade organized a small group seminar about selective adsorption resonances in metal vicinal surfaces.  We discussed this important issue in surface physics and many other things as if we had always known each other. This familiarity and warm welcome struck me from the very beginning. During the coming years, I found this to be a very attractive aspect of his personality. During my stays in Gttingen, we had the opportunity to talk widely about science and life at lunch or dinner time, walking or cycling. During these nice meetings, he showed, with humility, an impressive cultural background. It is quite clear that his personal opinions about history, religion, politics, music, etc, come from considering and analyzing them as 'open dynamical systems'. In particular, with good food and better wine in a restaurant or at home, a happy cheerful soire is guaranteed with him, or even with only a good beer or espresso, and an interesting conversation arises naturally. He likes to listen before speaking. Probably not many people know his interest in tractors. He has an incredible collection of very old tractors at home. In one of my visits to Clemson, he showed me the collection, explaining to me in great detail, their technical properties; all of them were ready for use! We cannot imagine him without his two old-fashioned Mercedes, also in his collection. He also has technical skills in construction and music and always has time for jogging. I would finally say that he is an even-tempered person. In brief, mens sana in corpore sano 1 .Dick is a theorist bound to experimental work, extremely intuitive and very dedicated. In his long stays outside Clemson, he always visited places where experiments were being carried out. He has been, and still is, of great help to experimental PhD students, postdocs or senior scientists in providing valuable advice and suggestions towards new measurements. Plausible interpretations of their results developing theoretical models or always searching for good agreement with experiment are two constants in his daily scientific work. Experimental work is present in most of his 150 papers. One of the main theoretical challenges in this field was to develop a formalism where the plethora of experimental results reported in the literature were accommodated. His transition matrix formalism was also seminal in the field of atom-surface scattering. Elastic and inelastic (single and double phonon) contributions were determined as well as the multiphonon background. This work was preceded by a theory for diffuse inelastic scattering and a posterior contribution for multiphonon scattering, both with V Celli. In a similar vein, a theory of molecule-surface scattering was also derived and, more recently, a theory for direct scattering, trapping and desorption. Very interesting extensions to scattering with molten metal and liquid surfaces have also been carried out. Along with collaborators he has studied energy accommodation and sticking coefficients, providing a better understanding of their meaning. G Armand and Dick proposed the well-known corrugated Morse potential as an interaction potential model providing reliable results of diffraction patterns and selective adsorption resonances. This proposal was, in a certain sense, the result of many previous studies carried out by the authors studying the hard corrugated wall, the eikonal approximation and the quantum theory of surface scattering. His stays with J Lapujoulade's group in Saclay were very fruitful for understanding diffraction patterns, surface phonons  and selective adsorption resonances in metal vicinal surfaces. Together with R H Ritchie, he proposed some corrections to Van der Waals forces in 1985 and 1986. Self-energies of a charge near a surface or image states or potentials for electrons were also studied in collaboration with R H Ritchie in Oak Ridge and P Echenique in San Sebastian. In particular, they proposed a theory for cluster impact fusion in 1990.With J P Toennies and his group and visitors in Gttingen, many experimental features or effects were interpreted with Dick's invaluable collaboration. Thus, for example, we have (i) the large-momentum transfer undulations observed in the angular distribution of He atoms scattered by a platinum surface in the presence of a single CO adsorbate (the so-called reflection symmetry interference); (ii) the inelastic interference structures of the frustrated translational mode of CO on a copper surface; (iii) defect mediated diffraction resonances; (iv) inelastic focusing; (v) diffraction from nanostructure transmission gratings, etc.   With J G Skofronick and S A Safron and their group in Tallahassee, He atom inelastic scattering from insulator experiments were carried out to test his theory. With K-H Rieder and his group in Berlin, Dick mainly considered the scattering of atoms from clean surfaces and in the presence of defects at grazing angles. And, finally, with W Ernst and his group in Graz, glass surface dynamics was developed as well as observation of the so-called boson peak.Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all contributors and those who were contacted but could not participate in this festschrift. They had to decline with regret because they had been retired for a long time, or had changed their research field, or were not able to meet the deadline. In any case, this initiative was really very welcome and supported with great enthusiasm by everybody. From all of the correspondence I have received expressing gratitude and honor for being invited to contribute, I would like to quote some words from G Comsa which reflect all of these feelings: 'Dick deserves, indeed, to be honored for both his scientific accomplishments and certainly no less for his modesty, honesty, friendliness and human warmth, qualities which are rarely honored'.I certainly cannot close this preface without mentioning the praiseworthy and professional work carried out by the Editorial Board, publishing team and Editors; in particular, L Smith and G Wright for their help and enthusiastic disposition. Thank you very much to everybody.1  A healthy mind in a healthy body. 
TI - Atom-surface scattering
JF - Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter
DO - 10.1088/0953-8984/22/30/300301
DA - 2010-08-04
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/iop-publishing/atom-surface-scattering-7ox0Srmq2m
SP - 300301
VL - 22
IS - 30
DP - DeepDyve
ER -