University Education
In 1942, he enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge to study Metallurgy. There, in 1943, he met Pat Hanson, the daughter of a distinguished professor of metallurgy who was studying English, and who was to become his wife in 1947.
In 1945, he studied for a doctorate under Egon Orowan at the Cavendish Laboratory. The objective of his research was to prove the existence of dislocations, whose existence had been postulated by Orowan and others before the war. Using studies of single crystal wires of zinc, Cahn demonstrated by X-ray diffraction that long strain-free crystallites had formed by recrystallisation following heating of a deformed wire. Optical observation under a microscope showed that these were accurately perpendicular to the glide planes. Consultations with Alan Cottrell at Birmingham had confirmed that this arrangement was to be expected on theoretical grounds if dislocations existed.
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