John B. Goodenough

John Goodenough
Born	John Bannister Goodenough (1922-07-25) July 25, 1922 Jena, Weimar Germany
Education	Yale University (BS) University of Chicago (MS, PhD)
Known for	Li-ion rechargeable battery, Goodenough–Kanamori rules
Awards	Japan Prize (2001) Enrico Fermi Award (2009) National Medal of Science (2011) IEEE Medal for Environmental and Safety Technologies(2012) Charles Stark Draper Prize (2014) Welch Award (2017) Copley Medal (2019) Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2019)
Scientific career
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of Oxford University of Texas at Austin
Doctoral advisor	Clarence Zener
Notable students	Bill David (postdoc)

John Bannister Goodenough (born 25 July 1922) is an American professor, solid-state physicist and a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. He is currently a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the University of Texas at Austin. He is widely credited for the identification and development of the lithium-ion battery as well as for developing the Goodenough–Kanamori rules for determining the sign of the magnetic superexchange in materials.

Goodenough was born in Jena, Germany (then under the Weimar Republic) where his father, Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, who was later to become a Yale University history professor, was studying. After graduating from Yale, Goodenough served as a military meteorologist in World War II. He went on to get his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago and became a researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and later the head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at Oxford University. Since 1986, he has been a professor in UT's school of engineering.

He has been awarded the National Medal of Science, the Copley Medal, the Fermi Award, the Draper Prize, and the Japan Prize. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and, at 97 years old, became the oldest Nobel laureate in history.

Early life and education

Goodenough was born in Jena, Germany, to Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough (1893–1965) and Helen Meriam Goodenough. His father was working on his Ph.D. at the Harvard Divinity School at the time of John's birth and later became a Professor in the history of religion at Yale. John is also the younger brother of the late University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Ward Goodenough. John and his brother Ward attended boarding school at Groton School. John Goodenough received a B.S. in Mathematics, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1944, where he was a member of Skull and Bones.

After serving in the US Army as a meteorologist in World War II, he went to the University of Chicago to complete a masters and was awarded a Ph.D. in Physics in 1952. His doctoral supervisor was electrical breakdown theorist Clarence Zener and he worked and studied with physicists, including Enrico Fermi and John A. Simpson. While at Chicago he met and married history graduate student Irene Wiseman.

Early career at Lincoln Laboratory

During his early career, he was a research scientist at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. During this time he was part of an interdisciplinary team responsible for developing random access magnetic memory. His research efforts on RAM led him to develop the concepts of cooperative orbital ordering, also known as a cooperative Jahn–Teller distortion, in oxide materials, and subsequently led to his developing the rules for the sign of the magnetic superexchange in materials, now known as the Goodenough–Kanamori rules (with Junjiro Kanamori).

Tenure at the University of Oxford

Blue plaque erected by the Royal Society of Chemistry commemorating work towards the rechargeable lithium-ion battery at Oxford

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, he continued his career as head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at University of Oxford, where he identified and developed Li_xCoO₂ as the cathode material of choice for the Li-ion rechargeable battery that is now ubiquitous in today's portable electronic devices. Although Sony is responsible for the commercialization of the technology, he is widely credited for its original identification and development. He received the Japan Prize in 2001 for his discoveries of the materials critical to the development of lightweight rechargeable batteries.

Professor at University of Texas

Since 1986, he has been a Professor at The University of Texas at Austin in the Cockrell School of Engineering departments of Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering. During his tenure there, he has continued his research on ionic conducting solids and electrochemical devices. His group has identified Li_xFePO₄ as a less costly cathode material that is safe for power applications such as machine tools and Hybrid electric vehicles. His group has also identified various promising electrode and electrolyte materials for solid oxide fuel cells. He currently holds the Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering.

On December 9, 2008, the European Patent Office revoked Dr Goodenough's patent numbered 0904607. The decision is believed to be based on the lack of novelty.

Goodenough still works at the university at age 97 as of 2019, hoping to find another breakthrough in battery technology.

On February 28, 2017 Goodenough and his team at the University of Texas published a paper in the journal Energy and Environmental Science on their demonstration of a low-cost all-solid-state battery that is noncombustible and has a long cycle life with a high volumetric energy density, and fast rates of charge and discharge. Instead of liquid electrolytes, the battery uses glass electrolytes that enable the use of an alkali-metal anode without the formation of dendrites. Goodenough and colleague Maria Helena Braga hold a patent via University of Texas for solid-state electrolytes and they continue to advance battery-related research, working on several more patents.

Fundamental investigations

On the fundamental side, his research has focused on magnetism (e.g. the Goodenough–Kanamori rules) and on the transition from magnetic-insulator to metallic behavior in transition-metal oxides. On the basis of the Virial Theorem, he recognized that this transition should be first-order and should, where the phase transition occurs at too low a temperature for atomic diffusion, result in lattice instabilities. At this crossover, these instabilities lead to charge-density waves in single-valent oxides and to phase-fluctuations in mixed-valent oxides. The phase fluctuations are responsible for such unusual physical properties as high-temperature superconductivity in copper oxides and a colossal magnetoresistance in manganese and cobalt oxides.

Around 2016 he helped develop the glass battery, a developmental battery with a glass electrolyte that is claimed to exceed current lithium-ion batteries in energy density, operating temperature range, and safety.

Distinctions

Professor Goodenough is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, French Academy of Sciences, and the Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales of Spain. He has authored more than 550 articles, 85 book chapters and reviews, and five books, including two seminal works, Magnetism and the Chemical Bond (1963) and Les oxydes des metaux de transition (1973). Goodenough is a co-recipient of the 2009 Enrico Fermi Award. This presidential award is one of the oldest and most prestigious given by the U.S. government and carries an honorarium of $375,000. He shares the honor with Dr. Siegfried S. Hecker, professor at the Management Science and Engineering Department of Stanford University.

In 2010 he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. On February 1, 2013, Goodenough was presented with the National Medal of Science. In 2015 he was listed along with M Stanley Whittingham, for pioneering research leading to the development of the lithium-ion battery on a list of Clarivate Citation Laureates for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry by Thomson Reuters. In 2017 he received the Welch Award in Chemistry and in 2019 he was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society.

The Royal Society of Chemistry grants a John B Goodenough Award in his honour.

Goodenough received an honorary C.K. Prahalad award from Corporate EcoForum (CEF) in 2017. CEF's founder Rangaswami commented, “John Goodenough is evidence of imagination being put to work for the greater good. We're thrilled to recognize his lifetime of achievements and are hopeful that his latest discovery will have major implications for the future of sustainable battery storage.”

Goodenough was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on October 9, 2019, for his work on lithium batteries, along with M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino. He is the oldest person to be awarded the Nobel Prize.

Works

Articles

• John B. Goodenough (1955). "Theory of the role of covalence in the Perovskite-type Manganites [La, M(II)]MnO₃". Phys. Rev. 100: 564–573. Bibcode:1955PhRv..100..564G. doi:10.1103/physrev.100.564.
• K. Mizushima; P.C. Jones; P.J. Wiseman; J.B. Goodenough (1980). "Li_xCoO₂ (0<x<-1): A new cathode material for batteries of high energy density". Mater. Res. Bull. 15 (6): 783–799. doi:10.1016/0025-5408(80)90012-4.
• John B. Goodenough (1985). B. Schuman, Jr.; et al. (eds.). "Manganese Oxides as Battery Cathodes" (PDF). Proceedings Symposium on Manganese Dioxide Electrode: Theory and Practice for Electrochemical Applications. Re Electrochem. Soc. Inc, N.J. 85–4: 77–96.
• Lightfoot, P.; Pei, S. Y.; Jorgensen, J. D.; Manthiram, A.; Tang, X. X. & J. B. Goodenough. "Excess Oxygen Defects in Layered Cuprates", Argonne National Laboratory, The University of Texas-Austin, Materials Science Laboratory United States Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, (September 1990).
• Argyriou, D. N.; Mitchell, J. F.; Chmaissem, O.; Short, S.; Jorgensen, J. D. & J. B. Goodenough. "Sign Reversal of the Mn-O Bond Compressibility in La_1.2Sr_1.8Mn₂O₇ Below T_C: Exchange Striction in the Ferromagnetic State", Argonne National Laboratory, The University of Texas-Austin, Center for Material Science and Engineering United States Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, Welch Foundation, (March 1997).
• A.K. Padhi; K.S. Nanjundaswamy; J.B. Goodenough (1997). "Phospho-Olivines as Positive Electrode Materials for Rechargeable Lithium Batteries" (PDF). J. Electrochem. Soc. 144 (4): 1188–1194. doi:10.1149/1.1837571.
• John B. Goodenough (2004). "Electronic and ionic transport properties and other physical aspects of perovskites". Rep. Prog. Phys. 67 (11): 1915–1973. Bibcode:2004RPPh...67.1915G. doi:10.1088/0034-4885/67/11/R01.
• Goodenough, J. B.; Abruna, H. D. & M. V. Buchanan. "Basic Research Needs for Electrical Energy Storage. Report of the Basic Energy Sciences Workshop on Electrical Energy Storage, April 2-4, 2007", United States Department of Energy, (April 4, 2007).
• "John B. Goodenough". Faculty. The University of Texas at Austin Mechanical Engineering Department. May 3, 2005. Archived from the original on September 28, 2011. Retrieved 2011-08-23.

Books

• John B. Goodenough (1963). Magnetism and the Chemical Bond. Interscience-Wiley, New York. ISBN 0-88275-384-3.

• John B. Goodenough (1973). Les oxydes des métaux de transition. Paris: Gauthier-Villars.
• John B. Goodenough, ed. (2001). Structure & Bonding, V. 98 (PDF).CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)

See also

• Junjiro Kanamori
• Koichi Mizushima (scientist)
• Rachid Yazami

Notes

h

Further reading

• John N. Lalena; David A. Cleary (2005). Principles of Inorganic Materials Design. Wiley-Intersciece. pp. xi–xiv, 233–269. ISBN 0-471-43418-3.

External links

• Faculty Directory at University of Texas at Austin
• Array of Contemporary American Physicists
• History of the lithium-ion battery, Physics Today, Sept. 2016
• 1 hour interview with Goodenough on YouTube by The Electrochemical Society, 2016