Elias Burstein

Burstein died on June 17, 2017, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, at the age of 99.

Among his numerous professional roles, he was a member of the Solid State Sciences Committee of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences (1971–80) and served as its Chairman (1976–78). He was a member of the Arts and Sciences Committee of the Franklin Institute starting in 1995.

He held visiting professorships at the University of California, Irvine (1967–68), at the Hebrew University in Israel (1974), at the University of Parma in Italy (1974); was the Fiftieth Anniversary Jubilee Visiting Professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden (1981); and was Miller Visiting Research Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley (1996).

He was the founding editor of Solid State Communications (Pergamon Press) and its editor-in-chief (1963–92). In that capacity he was instrumental in establishing its editorial and publication policies, including granting each editor on its International Board of Editors full authority to accept or reject contributions. He has been co-editor of Comments on Condensed Matter Physics (Gordon and Breach) (1971-1981), and is Founding Editor and Co-Editor with Marvin Cohen, Douglas Mills, and Phillip J. Stiles of the series of volumes Contemporary Concepts of Condensed Matter Science, published by Elsevier.

Burstein along with Robert Hughes of the Chemistry Department and Robert Madden of the Metallurgy Department (both at the University of Pennsylvania), were the principal originators of the proposal to establish a laboratory for fundamental research on materials at the university. This led to the founding of the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM) at the University of Pennsylvania in 1961.

In 1958 he was appointed Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1982 he succeeded Nobel Laureate John Robert Schrieffer as Mary Amanda Wood Professor of Physics. He retired as a member of the standing Faculty in 1988, but has remained active as Mary Amanda Wood Professor Emeritus.

Burstein's pioneering scientific achievements have had a major impact on the understanding of fundamental optical phenomena that are exhibited by condensed matter. His early work with diamond-structure crystals and with rock salt and zincblende type crystals at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) elucidated their infrared properties, explaining the mechanisms of second-order infrared absorption by long wavelength lattice vibrations in terms of electrical and mechanical anharmonicity. His fundamental studies of infrared photoconductivity due to the photoionization of impurities in silicon and germanium at liquid helium temperature provided the foundation for the development of impurity-doped silicon and germanium infrared detectors. The 1954 paper that has become his most-cited publication explained an "anomalous shift" of the interband optical absorption edge of InSb to higher energies that had been reported by researchers at Bell Labs. The shift results from the conservation of wave vector in optical interband transitions when the Pauli exclusion principle forbids transitions to carrier-occupied states in the conduction or valence band. In later work at NRL, Burstein and his collaborators used low temperature absorption spectra to study the excited states of shallow impurities in silicon and detected deviations from the existing theoretical models. In other work, they investigated interband magneto-optical transitions in semiconductors, and formulated the theory of the phenomenon in terms of interband transitions between Landau subbands. They also reported the first observation of cyclotron resonance of electrons in InSb at room temperature at frequencies in the infrared, and explained this quantum mechanically as corresponding to intraband optical transitions between discrete Landau levels within the valence or conduction bands.

Burstein was a member of the Physics Section of the Crystal Branch at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (1945–58), later head of that branch (1948-1958), and thereafter head of the Semiconductors Branch (1958).

Burstein earned a BA degree in chemistry from Brooklyn College (1938) and an MA degree in chemistry from the University of Kansas (1941). He took graduate courses in chemistry and physics at MIT (1941–43) and in physics at Catholic University (1946–48). His doctoral studies were interrupted by the war in 1945, when he went to work at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. Although he did not earn a PhD degree, he received four honorary doctorates (see Honors).

Elias Burstein (September 30, 1917 – June 17, 2017) was an American experimental condensed matter physicist whose active career in science spanned seven decades. He is known for his pioneering fundamental research in the optical physics of solids; for writing and editing hundreds of articles and other publications; for bringing together scientists from around the world in international meetings, conferences, and symposia; and for training and mentoring dozens of younger physicists.

Burstein was born September 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian-born Jewish parents Samuel Burstein (1890-1950) and Sara Plotkin (1896-1985). He married Rena Ruth Benson on September 19, 1943. He is the father of three daughters (Joanna, Sandra, and Miriam), and has two grandchildren.