Under the microscope ... David Cockayne, a recognised expert in the field of electron microscopy.
Professor David Cockayne was the director of the electron microscope unit at the University of Sydney from 1974 until the end of 1999. He developed it from a small service provider to a major research facility and established himself as a world expert on the electron microscopy of semiconductors, a field of great importance in the digital age.
David John Hugh Cockayne was born on March 19, 1942, the middle of three children of John Cockayne and his wife, Ivy (nee Hatton). John was a London policeman but realised that England was never going to give his children the opportunities they deserved, so the family migrated to Melbourne when David was eight.
David won a scholarship to Geelong Grammar. He went on to read physics at the University of Melbourne and graduated with first-class honours. He also got to know Jean Kerr.
He stayed at Melbourne to do an MSc, working with the pioneers of electron diffraction, John Cowley and Alex Moodie. Cockayne's task was to do the experimental work to verify Cowley and Moodie's method for calculating how electrons were scattered in thick specimens. He showed that the theory was correct except for one embarrassing slip - they had got the sign wrong so everything positive should have been negative and viceversa.
Then Cockayne was awarded a Commonwealth scholarship to take a doctorate at Magdalen College, Oxford. A week before he left he and Jean were formally engaged. Jean followed him and, in 1967, they married in Oxford.
Cockayne took up a research lectureship at Christ Church after completing his DPhil, so the couple remained in Oxford until 1974. It was in Oxford that Cockayne made the breakthrough that established his reputation.
He was studying dislocations - imperfections in the crystal lattice. These are easily seen in the electron microscope using diffracted (scattered) electrons but the images are so contrasting that all fine detail is lost.
Cockayne realised that if he used a direction in which the crystal scattered weakly, rather than the strong scattering used previously, he would be able to get much sharper images. The ''weak beam technique'' immediately improved resolution tenfold.
In 1974, Cockayne took up the directorship of the electron microscope unit at the University of Sydney. The range of service facilities was widened and Cockayne started giving the unit an active research presence.
A breakthrough was the move to a new building in 1981, which hugely expanded the space available. Later, with support under the ARC Key Centres scheme, the research side was formally split off as the Australian Key Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis but both wings occupied the same space and Cockayne was director of both. He also introduced a formal coursework program so students could take a diploma or master's degree through the Key Centre.
Cockayne's key research was studying the interface between crystals of different materials - another important issue for the semiconductor industry. David McKenzie got him interested in amorphous materials, which are conventionally assumed to have no structure, but the two Davids showed that with sufficiently meticulous technique one could find out a lot about something that appeared featureless. They were able to show that McKenzie had created thin films of amorphous diamond, a novel form of carbon.
The Australian Society for Electron Microscopy was formed in the 1980s, with Cockayne as its first president. He was already the general secretary (1984-1996) of the Asia Pacific Societies of Electron Microscopy. In 1995 he became the general secretary of the International Federation of Societies for Electron Microscopy and became the president in 2003. He served on many editorial boards and was editor-in-chief of the journal Micron. In 1999, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.
He had previously rejected many efforts to lure him away from Sydney but 1999 brought an offer he couldn't refuse - a chair in his old department, materials science, in Oxford. He took up that position in 2000. At his retirement, in 2009, he was awarded the Massey Medal of the Institute of Physics. By this time he was already terminally ill but he still managed to make the journey back for Christmas to see his first grandchild, Zoe.
David Cockayne is survived by Jean, children Sophie, Tamsin and James and granddaughter Zoe, sister Diana, brother Michael and stepsister Rhona.