Richard Magee Osgood Jr. (December 28, 1943 – October 20, 2023) was an American applied and pure physicist (condensed matter and chemical physics of surfaces, laser technology, nano-optics).
Osgood was married to Alice (née Dyson) and had three children, Richard M. III, a physicist, Nathaniel D., a computer scientist, and Jennifer Smestad, an attorney.
[12] Osgood, along with Ali Javan, made the first direct observation of vibrational-vibrational energy transfer and exchange in hydrogen halides.
[13][14][15] Later he made the first direct observation (with Steven Brueck) of vibration energy flow in molecules in cryogenic liquids the studies.
In the late 1970s, he, along with Thomas F. Deutsch and Daniel J. Ehrlich,[19][20][21][22] demonstrated submicrometer-scale chemical processing of the surfaces of electronic materials.
In 2002 he pioneered in developing Si photonics wires on silicon on insulator for new compact passive, active, and optical new linear device.
His group carried out the initial studies of linear and nonlinear Si-nanowire-photonics, including in 2001 Raman amplification (optical amplifier) in SOI technology (silicon-on-insulator, that is, silicon wires on an insulating underlay, with dimensions in the sub-micron range)[33] In addition, he developed a high-speed Si thermooptical switch and demonstrated diode-pumped fourwave mixing in the waveguides.
In addition, his research using two-photon photoemission with pulsed UV lasers was instrumental in early studies of image states on vicinal single-crystal metal surfaces.
[40][41][42] More recently in collaboration with Kevin Knox, Wencan Jin, Po-chun Yeh, Nader Zaki and Jerry Dadap, he used tightly focused UV photoemission based on a SPE-LEEM system to carry out the first photoemission studies of exfoliated graphene and transition metal dichalogide single samples and the influence of surface corrugation and layer number on sample electronic structure.
[55] 1991 to 1993 he was Distinguished Traveling Lecturer of the APS and 1986-1987 for IEEE CLEO and he was Plenary Speaker at the OITDA (Japanese Optoelectronic Industry and Technology Development Association).
1981 to 1988 he was Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics and was on the editorial advisory board of the Springer Series in Materials Science.