Giacinto Scoles was an Italian-American chemist and physicist who was best known for his pioneering development of molecular beam methods for the study of weak van der Waals forces between atoms, molecules, and surfaces.
19 Facts About Giacinto Scoles
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Giacinto Scoles developed the cryogenic bolometer as a universal detector of atomic and molecule beams that not only can detect a small flux of molecules, but responds to the internal energy of the molecules.
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Giacinto Scoles was born in Turin, Italy, and was raised there throughout the Second World War.
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Giacinto Scoles returned to Italy and graduated the University of Genoa in 1959 with a degree in Chemistry.
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In 1964, Giacinto Scoles returned to the University of Genoa as Assistant Professor of Physics.
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In 1971, Giacinto Scoles moved to the University of Waterloo, Canada as Professor of Chemistry and Physics.
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Giacinto Scoles help establish the Waterloo Centre for Molecular Beams and Laser Chemistry, the Centre for Surface Science in Technology, as well as the weekly chemical physics seminars and annual Symposium on Chemical Physics, both of which continue to this day.
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Giacinto Scoles was the initial Director of the Guelph-Waterloo Centre for Graduate Work in Chemistry, the first true inter-university graduate program in Canada.
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Giacinto Scoles performed crossed beam differential scattering cross-section studies of atom-atom, atom-molecule and molecule-molecule interactions, using his bolometer detector.
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Giacinto Scoles began using helium atom diffraction to study the structure of surfaces, both of pure crystals which often undergo change from the bulk structure and the structure of overlayers of atoms and molecules absorbed on surfaces.
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One of the experiments that Giacinto Scoles brought to Princeton was the study of IR spectroscopy of molecules attached to inert gas clusters, particularly Ar and Xe clusters.
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Giacinto Scoles was instrumental in the establishment of the Princeton Materials Institute and became a close collaborator of Peter Eisenberger, its first director.
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Giacinto Scoles brought to Princeton his Helium Diffraction Spectrometer for the study of surface structure.
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Giacinto Scoles's focus turned from inorganic overlayers to the study of self-assembled monolayers, particularly alkane thiols on Au.
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Giacinto Scoles collaborated with Eisenberger in using X-Rays as a complementary surface structure tool and showed the power of the combination of the two methods.
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Giacinto Scoles developed expertise in atomic force microscopy to study surface structure and more recently, tip induced surface modification using the nanografting technique [16,17] which had been previously developed by his former student Gang Yu Liu.
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In collaboration with Steve Bernasek, Giacinto Scoles has studied the influence of vibrational excitation on the sticking probability of a molecule on a metal surface.
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Later, Giacinto Scoles expanded his research into nanoscale biological processes, biophysics, and nanomedicine, in connection with the local Consortium of Molecular Biomedicine.
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Giacinto Scoles died in Sassenheim, Netherlands on 24 September 2024, at the age of 89.