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Brian E. Bent, a professor of chemistry at Columbia University whose promising young career had already produced pioneering work in experimental surface science, collapsed and died Tuesday while on vacation with his family in northern Minnesota. He was 35 and lived on Morningside Heights.
Professor Bent was cycling in Superior National Forest when he was stricken, said his wife, Stacey. He was taken to North Shore Hospital, Grand Marais, Minn., where he was pronounced dead.
No cause of death has been established, said his wife.
Professor Bent had taught at Columbia since 1988 and had just been appointed professor July 1 in recognition of his remarkable achievements, among them demonstrating how chemical reactions, especially between a gas and a solid, take place at solid surfaces. His experimental approach was to seal a well-prepared surface under ultra-high vacuum conditions, allow the reaction to take place and then probe the surface using electron beams, mass spectroscopy and isotope labeling to identify molecules and their actions on the surface.
"Professor Bent, in his brief but brilliant scientific career, made pioneering contributions to our understanding of chemical reactions at semiconductor and metal surfaces," said Kenneth B. Eisenthal, professor and chairman of Columbia's Department of Chemistry. "He combined deep physical insight with an imaginative streak that led to experiments of elegance and importance.
"Based on his outstanding accomplishments in his young life one can only imagine the beautiful work that he would have produced and the marked impact it would have had in chemistry."
Professor Bent's work, reported in more than 75 publications, answered long-standing questions of fundamental and practical importance in catalytic reactions at the surface of a solid, metal-catalyzed synthesis of organic substances, and materials deposition and etching. He demonstrated the mechanism of the Fischer-Tropsch process for synthesizing hydrocarbons, which German industry used to manufacture 15 million barrels of fuel annually during World War II. The process, discovered in 1926 and debated ever since, adds hydrogen to carbon monoxide to create a variety of hydrocarbons and is still commercially important.
Professor Bent showed, at the molecular level, how a number of commercially important chemical reactions take place. He synthesized dimethyl silicon chloride, the basis of a $1 billion silicone polymer industry in the United States, from silicon and methyl chloride, using a copper catalyst in a vacuum. "No one had ever succeeded in completing this reaction under controlled conditions, in a vacuum," Professor Eisenthal said.
Professor Bent and his colleagues recently published research demonstrating a new method of fabricating microelectronic devices that use the semiconductor gallium arsenide. Current methods mask the gallium arsenide and expose certain areas to high-energy plasma or ion or electron beams that etch away several layers of the semiconductor at once. Professor Bent found an all-chemical method that etches away a single layer of gallium arsenide at a time, resulting in a final product with fewer defects.
He resolved the controversy over the role of radicals in classic syntheses bearing the names Ullmann, Grignard, Wurtz, and Rochow, all involving scission of a carbon-halogen bond. He demonstrated the elusive Eley-Rideal mechanism, in which a layer of molecules adsorbed to a surface reacts with a gas in the surrounding atmosphere, in plasma etching of organic polymers.
Professor Bent was a patient and attentive mentor to his many students, graduate and undergraduate, said his colleagues in Columbia's Department of Chemistry. Research and teaching were not separate, and he acted on this belief by participating in special summer programs for minorities, women and undergraduates from other institutions. Many visiting students were introduced to surface science in the Bent laboratory.
"He managed an intensely active professional life the illusion of effortlessness, and was immensely proud of his two children," said Philip Pechukas, professor of chemistry. "He even made time for two other passions; he was an avid and skilled cellist and an enthusiastic birdwatcher."
Born in Minneapolis October 18, 1960, he graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Carleton College in 1982 and earned the Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, under surface chemist Gabor Somorjai, in 1986. He joined the Columbia faculty in 1988 after two years of postdoctoral research with a prominent organic chemist, Ralph Nuzzo, at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he studied mechanisms of chemical reactions in the manufacture of electronic devices.
His work had already brought him many awards and honors: he was named a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator in 1989, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 1992, a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar in 1993, and, last year, recipient of the Union Carbide Innovation Recognition Award.
Chemistry is in the Bent family. His father, Henry, is a noted chemistry educator, now professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. His sister is a chemist who worked for DuPont. He married Stacey Shane, who is assistant professor of chemistry at New York University, in 1991.
He is survived by his parents, Henry and Anne, of Pittsburgh; by his sister, Libby, of Buffalo; and by his wife and their children, Rachel and Andrew.
A memorial service will be held at Columbia in the fall.
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