Kenneth Button (physicist)

For the transport expert, see Kenneth Button.

Kenneth John Button (11 October 1922, Rochester, New York – 30 August 2010, Indialantic, Florida) was a solid-state and plasma physicist. He was the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Infrared and Millimeter Waves from its inception in 1980 until his resignation in 2004.[1]

Education and career

After serving for four years during WW II in the U.S. Army Infantry, Button attended the University of Rochester, where he received his bachelor's degree and then his M.S. in physics in 1952.[2] He joined in 1951 MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, where he did research, often in collaboration with Benjamin Lax, on semiconductors by studying their energy band structure using cyclotron resonance. Research on germanium and silicon done at the Lincoln Laboratory played an essential role in the development of semiconductor devices.

In 1962 he helped to found the MIT National Magnet Laboratory on the MIT campus in Cambridge. In 1965 he convinced H. A. Gebbie of the NPL in the UK to bring to the MIT Magnet Lab a copy of the newly discovered 0.337 mm wavelength cyanide laser. Using that laser, Button, Gebbie and Lax collaborated to study cyclotron resonance in semiconductors at magnetic fields up to 18 T and temperatures down to 40K. This THz laser spectrometer coupled with magnetic tuning of semiconductor bands opened up a major new field of research that led to many significant publications in the 1960s and 1970s. Ken held the position of Senior Scientist at MIT and headed the research group on quantum electronics until his retirement in 1988.[1]

Button was in 1974 the Program Chairman of the first conference on "Submillimeter Waves and Their Applications". He was the founder, and General Chairman for many years, of the annual conference called the "International Conference on Infrared and Millimeter Waves" (and now called the "International Conference on Infrared, Millimeter, and Terahertz Waves"). In his honor, the Kenneth J. Button Prize is awarded annually.[3]

Selected publications

as editor

References

  1. 1 2 "Kenneth J. Button: A Memoriam". Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Infrared, Millimeter, and Terahertz Waves, Houston, Texas, October 2–7, 2011.
  2. ↑ "Nuclear Cross Section for 37-Mev Positive Pions in Pb". Phys. Rev. 88: 956. 15 November 1952. Bibcode:1952PhRv...88..956B. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.88.956.
  3. ↑ Kenneth J Button Award Winners | Irmmw-thz
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