Eric Burhop

Eric Henry Stoneley Burhop, (31 January 191122 January 1980) was an Australian physicist and humanitarian.

A graduate of the University of Melbourne, Burhop was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship to study at the Cavendish Laboratory under Lord Rutherford. Under the supervision of Mark Oliphant, he investigated nuclear fusion. He produced a non-relativistic theory of the Auger effect in 1935, followed by a relativistic treatment the following year. He later wrote a monograph on the subject. He returned to the University of Melbourne as a lecturer in 1936, and helped Professor Thomas Laby build up the physics department there.

During the Second World War, he worked in the Radiophysics Laboratory in Sydney, where he produced a laboratory model of a cavity magnetron. In September 1942, he returned to Melbourne as the officer in charge of the Radar Research Laboratory, where he continued the development of cavity magnetrons and reflex klystrons for radar sets. In May 1944, he became one of three Australian physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bombs. In early 1945, Harrie Massey offered Burhop a position as a lecturer in the Mathematics Department at University College, London. He fostered international cooperation in nuclear physics.

While never formally charged with atomic espionage or so much as directly questioned by investigators, due to his leftist political views, anti-nuclear activism as well as his personal links to exposed Soviet spies, Burhop was the subject of comprehensive surveillance on the part of the UK, US and Australia's counterespionage agencies in the 1940s–1950s, a fact that was publicised in 2019.

Early life Eric Henry Stoneley Burhop was born in Hobart, Tasmania, on 31 January 1911, the third child of two Salvation Army officers, Henry Augustus Burhop and his wife Bertha née Head. His family was not wealthy, and they moved frequently owing to the nature of his parents' evangelical work. The family moved to Ballarat in 1923, where he attended Ballarat High School for most of his secondary education, receiving his leaving (Year 11) certificate in 1926. He transferred to Melbourne High School for his final year. He initially studied civil engineering, but switched to science after two years, and majored in physics. In 1929, he was awarded a bursary that provided financial assistance. He graduated in 1931 with a Bachelor of Science BSc degree with first class honours in physics. He then earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA), also with first class honours, in mathematics in 1932, and a Master of Science in physics in 1933.

Cavendish Laboratory

The thesis was good enough, though, for Burhop to be awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship to study at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory under Lord Rutherford in 1933. The scholarship included a first-class ticket to London on the liner RMS Oronsay. He continued his investigations of X-rays and the Auger effect. He conducted investigation of the probabilities of the ionisation of the K and L shells of silver, using the Born approximation. In 1935, he produced a non-relativistic theory of the Auger effect . This followed by a relativistic treatment in 1936 with Harrie Massey, another Australian expatriate fellow at the Cavendish. His work on the Auger effect would culminate in a monograph, The Auger Effect and Other Radiationless Transitions (1952). Burhop established the first research program in the field in an Australian university, employing scientific equipment that he brought back from Britain. The centrepiece of the research effort was a 300 keV accelerator that produced a homogeneous neutron beam, which he commissioned in August 1939. He gave lectures on modern physics to the undergraduates, and on quantum mechanics to the postgraduates. In September 1942 he returned to the University of Melbourne as the officer in charge of the Radar Research Laboratory, an outpost of the Radiophysics Laboratory, where his task was turning his cavity magnetrons and reflex klystrons from prototypes into production models. the Allied effort to create atomic bombs. In May 1944, Burhop joined Oliphant's British Mission at the Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). The Radiation Laboratory's task was to develop an electromagnetic isotope separation process. Burhop worked with David Bohm in Massey's Theoretical Group, studying the characteristics of electric discharges in magnetic fields, today known as Bohm diffusion. They also studied the ionisation of uranium compounds used as feed in the electromagnetic uranium enrichment process such as uranium tetrachloride (UCl4) and uranium hexafluoride (UF6). Burhop's work involved the occasional visit to the Manhattan Project's Y-12 electromagnetic faculty at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In July 1951, the British government cancelled his passport when he accepted an offer to travel to the Soviet Union. A new passport was issued after he gave the Foreign Secretary a written assurance that he would not seek to travel to the Soviet Union or other Iron Curtain countries. MI5 continued to surveil him until at least 1958. He was elected a Foreign Member of the German Democratic Republic's Academy of Sciences in 1971. He died in Camden, London, from empyema as a result of stomach cancer on 22 January 1980. He was survived by his wife and children.