Marc Aaron Kastner

Marc Aaron Kastner (born November 20, 1945 in Toronto ) is a Canadian - American solid-state physicist .

Kastner studied at the University of Chicago with a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1967, a master's degree in physics in 1969 and a doctorate in physics in 1973, while he was a research fellow at Harvard University in 1972/73 . In 1973 he became an Assistant Professor and later Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he has been Donner Professor of Science since 1989 . From 1983 to 1987 he was head of the atomic, solid state and plasma physics department at MIT, from 1998 to 2007 he was head of the physics faculty at MIT and in 2007 he became dean of the School of Science there.

Kastner initially dealt with amorphous semiconductors, which led to the alternating valence model of localized defect states. He later studied magnetic and electrical properties of high temperature superconductors and semiconductor nanostructures. Among other things, he investigated single electron transistors (SET), in which electrons in nanostructures are localized by electrostatic forces in semiconductors. They then show quantization effects analogous to artificial atoms and (with an uneven number of electrons) the Kondo effect analogous to magnetic impurities in metals. He and his group also investigated regular arrangements of nanocrystals (in collaboration with chemists from MIT) and quasiparticle excitations in the fractional quantum Hall effect by means of tunnels in suitably constructed nanostructures.

From 1983 to 1987, he was at MIT's Associate Director of the Superconducting Electronics Consortium, which brings together scientists and engineers in the field of superconducting thin film electronics.

In 2000 he received the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize with Gerald Dolan and Theodore A. Fulton for pioneering work on single-electron effects in mesoscopic systems . In 2008 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science . He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society , of which he was David Adler Lecturer in 1995.

Fonts

• Artificial Atoms , Physics Today, January 1993
• The single electron transistor , Reviews of Modern Physics, Volume 64, 1992, p. 849
• with RJ Birgeneau, G. Shirane, Y. Endoh Magnetic, Transport, and Optical Properties of Monolayer Copper Oxides , Reviews of Modern Physics, Volume 70, 1998, p. 897
• Single electron transistor and artificial atoms , Annalen der Physik, Volume 9, 2000, p. 885
• with Goldhaber-Gordon, Kondo Physics with Single Electron Transistors , Solid State Communications, Volume 119, 2001, pp. 245-252

Web links

• Homepage at MIT
• Buckley Prize for Kastner
• Biography at the AIP