Professor Batterman attended the Cooper Union in New York as an undergraduate in chemical engineering, and completed his program at M.I.T. with a major in physics. During his graduate years at M.I.T., he was a Fulbright exchange student in Germany at the Stuttgart Technische Höchschule. After completing his doctorate, he worked for Bell Laboratories as a member of the technical staff, and then came to Cornell in 1965 as a member of both the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the School of Applied and Engineering Physics. In 1971-72 he was awarded both a Guggenheim fellowship and a Fulbright-Hayes fellowship. Batterman was chairman of the School of Applied and Engineering Physics from 1974 to 1978, when he became director of the newly established Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (now the Center for High Energy Synchrotron Studies, or CHESS), a national laboratory for synchrotron radiation research. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of the U.S. National Committee for Crystallography. He is also a member of the Solid State Advisory Panel for Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Proposal Review Panel for the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. In 1983 he received the Humboldt Award from the Federal Republic of Germany and in 1985 he was named the Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of Engineering.

Research Interests

Our main efforts at the present time are divided between running the Center for High Energy Synchrotron Studies (CHESS) facility, a national laboratory for synchrotron radiation studies, and conducting research in condensed-matter physics.

The CHESS laboratory, one of the country’s foremost providers of high-energy x-rays for research, is under continual development and improvement. It has earned an international reputation for its studies in time-resolved diffraction and real-time studies of biological molecules. Of particular significance is the solving of the first structure of an animal virus (rhinovirus-14: a common-cold virus), an achievement that was made possible by the specialized equipment and techniques of this facility. Our research efforts involved in the operation of CHESS include the development of x-ray optics and instrumentation and their utilization in solid-state studies.

A chief interest has been the study of the structure of crystal surfaces using x-ray standing waves. Current projects involve study of the atomic reconstruction of an ultraclean surface of silicon, and the detection of a single-atom layer by glancing-angle surface reflection. The magnetic structure of materials has also been probed using the weak coupling between electromagnetic radiation and the magnetic moment of atoms. The intense x-ray beams available at CHESS have made the technique possible. A crystal device has been constructed to create circularly polarized high-energy x-rays with high intensities. Circularly polarized x-rays are an important probe for magnetic scattering.