Ernest Omar Wollan

Ernest O. Wollan (left) and Clifford Shull working with a double-crystal neutron spectrometer at the ORNL X-10 graphite reactor in 1949. Ernest Omar Wollan (November 6, 1902 – March 11, 1984) was an American physicist who made major contributions in the fields of neutron scattering and health physics.

Biography Wollan was a native of Glenwood, Minnesota. After earning a bachelor's degree at Concordia College in 1923, he undertook graduate study at the University of Chicago, where he investigated X-ray scattering under Arthur Compton and received a Ph.D. in 1929. Over the next several years, he taught physics at North Dakota State College and Washington University in St. Louis, spent a year in Zurich as a National Research Council fellow conducting research on cosmic rays, and worked with the Chicago Tumor Institute on its medical use of a radium source. He was one of the 50 scientists present on December 2, 1942, when the first man-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was achieved in the Chicago Pile-1 experiment.

Working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) after World War II, he continued study into neutron scattering, using the neutrons emitted from the X-10 Graphite Reactor and a modified X-ray diffractometer.

In collaboration with Clifford G. Shull, who joined him at ORNL in 1946, he developed neutron diffraction methodology used for determining atomic resolution structure of substances. In 1994, Shull was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on neutron diffraction. The unusual delay in the Nobel award, which came more than four decades after the work that it recognized, may have resulted from negative views of the work's relationship to nuclear power. Wollan was not eligible for the Nobel because he had died 10 years earlier. In his Nobel lecture Shull spoke of Wollan's contributions and expressed regret that his colleague had not lived long enough to share in the prize.

Wollan remained a member of the ORNL research staff until retiring in 1967. For much of his 23-year service at ORNL, he was associate director of the Physics Division. He continued as a consultant to ORNL until 1977. Fellow of the American Physical Society, elected in 1936 Concordia College awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science in 1965. John Price Wetherill Medal, 1967