on problems related to dielectric breakdown in glasses.
With the growing involvement of the United States in the conflict which developed into World War II, Maurer joined a group in the physics department of the University of Pennsylvania which was seeking, under the sponsorship of the Radiation Laboratory of MIT, to improve the performance of silicon diode rectifiers which were badly needed as heterodyne mixers in microwave radar. Two years later he accepted a tenure track appointment in the physics department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and began what became a lifetime academic career as a combination of teacher and head of a research laboratory. Initially, his research in Pittsburgh centered about a program proposed by the U. S. Navy, carried out in close cooperation with Otto Stern and Immanuel Estermann, who had come to Pittsburgh as refugees from Germany. The goal of the program was to develop what came to be called a dark trace screen for viewing the return images of radar. The normal images produced by fluorescent screens, which are highly effective in a somewhat darkened room, are difficult to see on the bridge of a ship in bright daylight. Most of the research focused on the use of evaporated layers of potassium chloride, the electron beam producing a spectrum of color-center darkening which closely matches the eye sensitivity curve for vision. Although the ideal dark trace screen was not found, the experience prepared Maurer for much additional research on defect phenomena in alkali halide crystals.
On request, Maurer spent a year and a half, until the end of the war, at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago where the large plutonium-producing reactors that were being constructed at Hanford Washington had been designed. He joined a mixed group of chemists and physicists trying to understand what effects the high level of radiation flux in the reactors might have on the properties of components-a problem posed by Eugene Wigner. In this connection, he carried out a series of delicate calorimetric measurements on the energy stored in graphite as a result of the disruption of the lattice that occurs when a specimen is exposed to cyclotron radiation. He also, in cooperation with Edward Creutz, carried out experiments on the production of bubbles in water exposed to ionizing radiation when the ambient pressure is decreased rapidly. His close colleagues dubbed him "Bubbles Maurer" as a result of this research, which was actually a forerunner of the invention of the well known bubble chamber used in high energy physics.
On returning to Pittsburgh at the end of the war, he soon attracted a steady stream of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, including a number from abroad. He retained close links with many of them, most of whom continued to carry out research in areas related in one way or another to that undertaken in his laboratory. One consequence of the association with foreign students and fellows was a series of invitations over many years to deliver lectures or serve on advisory committees in Europe, Asia and Latin America as well as the United States. He and his wife became well traveled.
In 1948, soon after the Office of Naval Research was well established, he took a brief leave to serve as head of its physics division, working in close cooperation with the leadership and staff. It was in his period that he and Lawson M. McKenzie created the Solid State Advisory committee for Solid State Physics. It eventually became an interagency advisory organization and is now attached to the National Academy of Sciences.
In 1949, Maurer was offered a position in the physics department of the University of Illinois as a result of a decision made jointly by the head of the department, F. Wheeler Loomis and the dean of graduate school, Louis N. Ridenour, to expand in solid state physics as well as in nuclear and high energy physics. Both physicists had served in the Radiation Laboratory at MIT during the war when much attention had been given to the improvement of silico