CHARLES FRANCIS SQUIRE, a leading low-temperature experimentalist and co-discoverer of antiferromagnetism, died in Houston on January 16, 2001. His last academic appointment was in the Physics Department at Texas A&M University, where he was Department Head in the late 1960's, at the same time that Clarence Zener was Dean of Science. He started the condensed matter program at Texas A&M, and was also the primary driving force behind the founding of the Cyclotron Institute and the program in experimental nuclear physics.

Charles Squire was born in Washington, D.C. on April 28, 1912, to Charles Henry and Minnie Compton Squire. He was raised in Washington and in Chevy Chase, Maryland with his older brother, the late Richard Compton Squire. In 1937 he earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from John Hopkins University, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Paris in 1938. The measurements that he and his colleagues made there, of the magnetic susceptibilty of MnO, were published in 1938. These measurements were the first experimental demonstration of antiferromagnetism, a phenomenon which had been predicted by Neel and which was also observed much later in the Nobel Prize winning neutron diffraction experiments of Clifford Shull. (See the October, 2001 issue of Physics Today.)

Dr. Squire was on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, until he was asked by the U.S. Navy to supervise the guided missile project for the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II. In recognition of his contribution, he received a citation from the War Department and the Navy.

After the war he returned to MIT. Among other projects, he helped Sam Collins with the development of the Collins Helium Liquifier. In 1947 Dr. Squire moved to Houston as Professor of Physics at The Rice Institute. There he established the first low temperature laboratory in Texas. At the same time he obtained the third Collins Liquifier. The first two Collins machines did not survive, so the one that Dr. Squire brought to Texas is the oldest remaining; it is now in the Smithsonian Institution. He took a sabbatical in 1952 to serve as Visiting Professor at the University of Paris. In 1960, he became the Director of Research for the Hamilton Standard Division of the United Aircraft Corporation in Hartford, Connecticut.

Dr. Squire returned to Texas in 1962 to serve as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M University. He was named a Distinguished Professor in 1968, and became Department Head the same year.

While at Texas A&M he established the low temperature laboratory, which has now evolved into a condensed matter group with six experimentalists and five theorists. In addition, he wrote the proposal for establishing the Cyclotron Institute, which represents the beginning of the experimental nuclear physics program at Texas A&M.

During his career he became Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the French Physical Society, and Associate Editor of The Physical Review. He also served the Division of Heat and Cryogenics at the National Bureau of Standards, the International Institute of Refrigeration Commission, the Houston Committee on Foreign Relations, andthe Houston Philosophical Society. Finally, he was the author of two books: Low Temperature Physics and Waves in Physics.