The Prince of Asturias Foundation
Manuel Cardona
Manuel Cardona Castro was born in Barcelona in 1934. He graduated in Physical Sciences in 1955 with a first-class summa cum laude degree and subsequently received the national prize for the best academic record in all of Spain’s science faculties. In 1956, he won the Smith-Mundt scholarship and moved to Harvard University to work as a graduate researcher under the supervision of Professor William Paul. There he began his thesis on the quadratic photomagneto-electric effect in germanium and silicon, with which he was to earn his PhD in Science from the University of Madrid in 1958. After continuing his work on the dielectric properties of germanium and silicon and their dependence on pressure and temperature, he also earned a PhD in Applied Physics from the University of Harvard in 1959. During his studies at this university, he was the recipient of a Juan March scholarship (1958) and a Bell Labs fellowship (1959). Manuel Cardona’s career further developed in the following years in Switzerland, USA and Germany. In 1959, he joined the staff of RCA Laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland, where he remained until moving in 1961 to the same company’s laboratory in Princeton, USA. In 1964, he accepted the post of associate professor in Physics at Brown University, being promoted to full professor in 1966. In 1971, he became director of the newly founded Max-Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. Prior to this last move, Cardona had been awarded a fellowship by the A.P. Sloan Foundation between 1965 and 1968 and by the Guggenheim Foundation between 1969 and 1970. In addition, in 1963 and 1965 respectively, he taught at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Buenos Aires, in the latter under the auspices of the Ford Foundation.
A specialist in the field of Solid State Physics, he has made decisive discoveries in the physics of materials, based on many of the new technologies. His work combines basic science contributions with key ideas for subsequent applications. Many of his works refer to semiconductors, the studies in which he interprets their properties in terms of electronic interactions being considered seminal. Advisor to RCA Laboratories (Princeton, New Jersey), GTE (Waltham, Massachusetts), IBM (Yorktown Heights, New York and Palo Alto, California) and Xerox PARC (Palo Alto, California), he is author or co-author of more than six hundred articles on scientific subjects and of the books Modulation Spectroscopy, Light Scattering in Solids (6 volumes) and Photoemission in Solids (2 volumes).
He has been a member of the editorial board of the scientific publications Physica Status Solid and Solid State Communications since 1972 and of Springer Series in Solid State Physics since 1975. Between 1974 and 1978, he was a contributor to the Journal of Physics C., of which he is now a member of the Executive Council. Since 1989, he has been associate editor of Physical Review Letters and associate editor-in-chief of Solid State Communications. Professor Cardona has belonged to the Review Board for Condensed Matter Physics of the German National Foundation of Science, the Council of the German Physical Society, the Scientific Council of DESY (Hamburg), the National Centre for Telecommunications Studies (Paris) and the Institute of Surface Science (Jülich, Germany), as well as being a member of the United States Academy of Sciences and of the Royal Academy of Science and Arts of Barcelona. He has served on the programme committees of all the International Semiconductor Conferences held since 1972, except those of Montpellier, 1982, and Stockholm, 1986. Holder of honorary doctorates from the Autonomous University of Madrid and the Autonomous University of Barcelona as well as honorary professor of the University of Stuttgart (Germany) and honorary member of the American Physical Society, Manuel Cardona received the RCA Laboratories Prize in 1962, the Narcís Monturiol Medal for Scientific Achievement in 1982, the Frank Isacson Award in 1984, the Johannes M. von Kronland Medal in 1988 and the Catalonian Foundation for Research Prize in 1990.
Marcos Moshinsky
Marcos Moshinsky (Kiev, Ukraine, 1921 - Mexico 2009). After graduating in Physics from the Autonomous University of Mexico, Marcos Moshinsky moved to the USA in the late Forties to work at Princeton University under Eugene P. Wigner, Nobel Prize winner in Physics, who supervised his PhD thesis (1949) on certain relativistic equations with special boundary conditions that simulate the interaction between particles. The techniques devised by Moshinsky in his thesis were to be widely used by himself and by other researchers in later years. He moved to Paris in 1954 with a grant from the CNRS. In 1962, he was appointed president of the Academy of Scientific Research, a post he held until 1967, and from then until 1969 he occupied the chair of the Mexican Physics Society.
He made significant contributions to the study of symmetries in the basic laws of nature that have facilitated a better understanding of the quantum physics that governs the behaviour of elementary particles. His scientific work focused from the outset on the fields of theoretical nuclear physics and mathematical physics. He began working in the Fifties on a schematic theory of nuclear reactions, in addition to studying the structure of atomic nuclei. In particular, he introduced the concept of transformation brackets for harmonic oscillator functions, which, together with the tables drawn up in collaboration with T. Brody, greatly simplified nuclear shell-model calculations. This model has subsequently become an indispensable technique for anyone interested in the study of nuclear structure. These studies appeared in book form: Tables of Transformation Brackets for Nuclear Shell-model Calculations (1960). In the Sixties, Moshinsky’s interest began to focus on the concept of hidden symmetry in problems of quantum mechanics. In the harmonic oscillator problem this symmetry is related to the unitary group, whose structure and application to many-body problems is summarized in two books: Group Theory and the Many Body Problem and The Harmonic Oscillator in Modern Physics: from Atoms to Quarks. In the Seventies, he mainly analysed two types of problems. The first of these was related to canonical transformations in classical mechanics and their representation in quantum mechanics. The second was the problem of collective motion in nuclei, both from the macroscopic point of view, in the group theory analysis of the Bohr-Mottelson model and of interacting bosons, and in the microscopic aspect, in what is known as the symplectic nuclear model. His interests in recent years addressed the structure of matter in strong magnetic fields, ranging from the solid state to elementary particles. He also worked on a relativistic symplectic model for quarks in elementary particles. As well as participating in the publication of several international scientific journals, Moshinsky published four books, two hundred technical publications and more than two hundred and fifty journalistic articles on education, scientific dissemination and the social impact of science.
He was a member of the Science Advisory Council of the Presidency of the Mexican Republic and a National Researcher Emeritus of the National System of Researchers. In 1961, he received the Mexican Academy of Sciences Research Prize. He also won the National Prize of Sciences and Arts and the Luis Elizondo Prize. His research work was also distinguished with the conferral of the Prize for Exact Sciences by the National University (UNAM) in 1985, which he donated to the victims of the earthquake of September of that same year.
