6th REM 2013
SIXTH INTERNATIONAL MEETING ON RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE STUDY OF RADIATION EFFECTS IN MATTER.
Park Vista Hotel, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, USA
23rd -25th October, 2013
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Mark Robinson
Festschrift.
The 6th International Meeting on Recent Developments in the Study of Radiation Effects in Matter will be organized to honour Mark T Robinson for or his many important contributions in the field of ion-solid interactions.

Mark was born in Oak Park, Illinois, June 23, 1926. He was educated at the University of Illinois and Oklahoma State University from where he recieved his PhD in 1951. He went to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1951 and spent sabbatical years at AERE Harwell, UK in 1964-65 and at KFA Julich in 1971-72. He also spent some time at the Max-Planck-Institute fur Plasmaphysik, Garching in 1983. He was trained as an experimental physical chemist but became interested in computer applications in about 1957-58. At that time he started collaborating with David K.Holmes and Ordean S. Oen on work that led to the discovery of channelling by computer simulation in 1962. This was quickly confirmed by groups working in Canada, the UK and Germany. His interest in computer simulation continued - particularly in sputtering, particle backscattering and radiation damage right up to his retiremnet in 1996.

His pioneering work in computer simulation led to the simulation program Marlowe which was much used and emulated through the 80s and well into the present time. His paper (with Ian M Torrens) on the use of the binary collision approximation in cascade simulations has attracted over 1,150 citations since it was published in 1974 and is still clocking up citations. His papers with Michael J. Norgett and Ordean S. Oen on displacement and ion reflection respectively have clocked up over 550 citations each.

Mark's most recognized claim to fame is the discovery of ion channelling by computer simulation. In 1962 (as now) ORNL was concerned about neutron-induced radiation damage in nuclear reactors and Mark and Ordean attempted to model the effects of an energetic copper projectile ion on a copper crystal lattice. Sheldon Datz had this to say about the work of Mark and Ordean: "They wanted to know how far a copper ion goes before it stops. They let their Monte Carlo computer program run for a long time, but they sometimes couldn't find where the particle went. They changed the code and their simulation showed that the copper atom often came out the other side of the lattice." Their modelling led to their prediction that ions can travel through a crystal in the spaces (or channel) between rows of atoms in the lattice - they had discovered ion channelling 2 years before John Davies and co-workers at Chalk River came together to try and interpret what appeared to be anomalous experimental data which could be explained by this channelling phenomenon.