Evan O'Neill Kane (physicist)


Evan O'Neill Kane, known as E. O. Kane in his publications, was a physicist who established some of the basic understanding of the theory of semiconductors that are now used in consumer and other electronics. He was one of the main developers of the k·p perturbation theory which is used to calculate band structures.

Ancestry

Kane's family had a long history in the U.S. His great, great uncle, Elisha Kent Kane, was a famous arctic explorer, writing popular books in the 1850s about his journeys. His great grandfather, Thomas Leiper Kane, who founded the town of Kane, Pennsylvania, was an American Civil War General. He also helped with the Underground Railroad and successfully urged the Buchanan Administration not to go to war with the Mormons in Salt Lake City. Kane's grandfather, also named Evan O'Neill Kane, was a doctor who was so enamoured of the idea of local anesthesia that he surgically removed his own appendix to show its effectiveness.

Life

Evan O'Neill Kane was born on December 23, 1924 in Kane, Pennsylvania. His father, Thomas Leiper Kane, died in 1933 of spinal meningitis, which was preceded by scarlet fever. He later moved with his mother and siblings to Daytona Beach, Florida, where he stayed through high school.

Career

Kane was an undergraduate at Princeton University, and interrupted his education to serve in the army during World War II. He graduated from Princeton University in 1948, and went directly to Cornell University to study towards his PhD in Physics, which was awarded in 1953 on an experimental project related to vacuum tube technology. Dr. Kane then joined the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York. There he began contributing to the theoretical underpinnings of the then-new field of semiconductor research. Semiconductors rapidly displaced vacuum tubes and are now used in most computers and electronic devices. He published widely in scientific journals. Perhaps his best known paper was published in 1956 on a technique to calculate the structure of solids. This technique is referred to as the k·p method for band structure calculations. It is still used by both theoretical and experimental solid state researchers.
Kane left General Electric in 1959 to join Hughes Aircraft in California and then moved to the Theoretical Physics Department in Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey in 1961. He continued his semiconductor research at Bell Labs, at the interface between experimental and theoretical physics, until AT&T was broken up. He then worked for BellCore until he retired in 1984.

Personal life

Evan O’Neill Kane married Anne Bassler in 1950 in Anne's home town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They lived together for over 40 years in New Providence, New Jersey, where they raised three children and coauthored one paper. In addition to distinction as a physicist, Dr. Kane was a devoted father and then grandfather, and became serially passionate about hobbies, including learning languages, canoeing, and long-distance running. In 1974 he became ranked second in the country in the 50 and over marathon category. He spent most of the rest of his life working in childcare for infants, toddlers and young children including his grandchildren and church group. He passed away in 2006 at the age of 81. The cause of death was complications secondary to myeloproliferative disease and myelodysplasia. After his death he was cremated and his ashes were buried at Christ Church in Summit, New Jersey. Kane's descendants currently include three children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Kane model

Kane used the k·p perturbation method to determine what became known as the Kane model or Kane Hamiltonian of the structure of energy bands of semiconductors. The Kane Hamiltonian describes the valence and conduction bands in sp3 bonded semiconductors: the group IV, II-V and II-VI semiconductors. This 1957 publication is still prominent in scientific literature and textbooks more than 50 years after its discovery. The model is now often cited via books where it is discussed, most notably in Yu's and Cardona's book, Fundamentals of Semiconductors.
In their book on the k·p method, Voon and Willatzen devote several chapters to explaining Kane models. They note that Kane's quasi-degenerate perturbation theory approach worked well for semiconductors with small band gaps. Kane improved previous valence band models by adding the lowest conduction band. This model was extended later to take into account the non-parabolicity of materials such as gallium arsenide. The model explains essentially most of the materials used in semiconductor technology. The theoretical literature describing the electronics and optical responses of these semiconductors all rely heavily on this model, as does the very active field of quantum phenomena in size-limited crystalline structures.

Selected publications