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Group History

Academic Staff

Prof. Eddie Seymour: Founding Member. 1965 - 1989

Prof. Ray Dupree: 1966 - Present

Dr Graham Styles: 1970 - 1995

Dr Andrew Howes: 1992 - Present

Prof. Mark Smith: 1999 - 2011 (continuing with visitor professor status)

Prof. Steven Brown: 2002 - Present

Prof. Ago Samoson: 2008 - 2013 (visiting professor)

Prof. Oleg Antzutkin: 2008 - 2014 (visiting professor)

Prof. John Hanna: 2008 - Present

Prof. Jozef Lewandowski: 2011 - Present

Dr Dominik Kubicki: 2021 - Present

Dr Wing Ying Chow: 2022 - Present

A Brief History

NMR of condensed matter has been a research strand of the Physics Department at Warwick since its establishment in 1965 with the initial work being carried out by Eddie Seymour on NMR in liquid metals. Ray Dupree joined the University in September 1966 initially to work on Conduction Electron Spin Resonance. The first commercial NMR spectrometer in the group, a Varian CW machine covering 4-32 MHz with a 1.4 T electromagnet, was delivered in 1967. Pulsed NMR was started by a couple of post-docs Edwin Claridge and Ed Dickson in 1968-9 and was used for both relaxation and diffusion measurements with a pulsed field gradient set-up. A wide range of materials were studied using NMR over the next 20 years including hydrogen in metals, fast ion conductors, and the metal-nonmetal transition in disordered systems. The first high resolution (MAS) measurements were made in 1983 on glasses and the first commercial spectrometer - a 360 MHz Bruker MSL- obtained in 1985.