Thirteen members of the Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics were elected Fellows of the American Physical Society, an honor bestowed each year by the society on a select group of its members from industry, academia, and government. Five of the FIAP members named Fellows work in industry. Matthew Warren Copel For two decades, Copel has mastered and expanded the use of medium-energy ion beam analysis to study electronic materials. In the late 1980s, he investigated the use of surfactants to grow germanium on a silicon surface. He showed that adsorbing a monolayer of arsenic or antimony on the silicon surface before beginning deposition prevented a major problem—the clustering of germanium on the surface—and enabled the growth of very smooth films. “The paper he co-authored in 1989 has been referenced about 600 times,” says Rudolf M. Tromp, manager of molecular assemblies and devices at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Laboratory.

In Matt Copel’s work, to probe thin-film composition with subnanometer depth resolution, ions are dispersed with different energies and angles and impinge on a channel plate, and the resultant charge cloud is detected by this backgammon collector. (IBM)

“Matt is an accomplished physicist and a great experimentalist,” Tromp says. “He has had a big impact in materials science, in the academic and international scientific communities, as well as within IBM.”

Christopher J. Hardy
“The father of cardiac magnetic resonance imaging” (MRI) is what Hardy’s former supervisor and collaborator, Bijan Dorri, calls him. “Chris has pushed cardiac MRI from just an idea to a reality,” says Dorri, General Electric’s (GE’s) global technology leader for medical technologies. “He created ways to ‘motion-freeze’ the heart and arteries, designed the needed pulse sequences, and created visualization techniques.”

Unlike the spine or muscle tissue, the heart beats rhythmically, and arteries pulse as they expand and contract. The challenge Hardy faced was how to “freeze” such movement to obtain a clear image. Over a decade, he attacked various problems. He developed the first graphical approach that allowed physicians to act in real time during cardiac imaging, and a technique that improved imaging speed, both of which are now major features of GE’s interventional and cardiovascular MRIs. Speed is particularly important in cardiac MRIs because for certain examinations, physicians want to obtain an image in the time a person can hold his or her breath. Otherwise, the movement of the heart with breathing will distort the image.

MRI requires pulses of radio-frequency energy and magnetic-field gradients, which are controlled by software. Different applications require different pulse sequences, and for cardiac imaging, it is crucial to apply the right pulse sequence to capture the moving heart and arteries clearly. Hardy designed many pulse sequences for cardiac MRI, creating the first two-dimensional, spatially selective NMR excitations pulses, and later made key contributions to analytic-design theory for two-dimensional pulses.

James H. Kaufman
In 1987, when Kaufman and his colleagues at the IBM Almaden Research Center (San Jose, CA) began working on a new protective overcoat for storage disks, read heads landed on disks, the spacing between the head and medium was 300 Å, and the head–disk interface typically survived 10,000 start–stop cycles. “We developed an overcoat material that worked at 60 Å and below and could survive more than 100,000 start–stop cycles,” he says.

Protective coatings were made then by sputtering graphite onto storage media. But carbon seeks to create four bonds, and forcing it into a thin film creates an unnatural configuration with high internal stress. “I thought we might lower the stress by adding nitrogen, which forms only three bonds,” Kaufman says. “That was the key. We made the film harder, and we lowered the stress by two orders of magnitude inside the film. That is what allowed us to make it thinner.” The resulting overcoat, commonly called nitrogenated diamondlike carbon and produced by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition, is now the storage industry standard.

Since joining IBM in 1985, Kaufman has conducted research and managed projects in areas such as condensed matter, magnetic materials, and advanced materials. Today, he is exploring grid computing, which harnesses the ideal time of many computers, from super to personal, to accomplish huge computations. “We are developing an innovative system to help people who do not have dedicated, parallel computers to solve big problems,” Kaufman says.

Mark Howard Kryder
“I suppose a thread runs through all of my work in magnetic domains,” says Kryder, “which is understanding the magnetization changes dynamically in a wide variety of magnetic thin films and devices.” As a graduate student in the l960s, Kryder built the first high-speed (10 ns exposure time) Kerr magneto-optic system that used a pulsed laser for photographing magnetic domains, which he used to study Permalloy thin films. He went on to use similar systems to explore the behavior of magnetic domains in areas such as magnetic-bubble memory devices, magneto-optic recording, and how magnetic domains affect the performance of magnetic recording heads and media.

Kryder did most of his research at Carnegie Mellon University, whose faculty he joined in 1978 and where he retains his title of University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In 1998, however, Seagate Technology named him senior vice president and director of Seagate Research, and established a new laboratory in Pittsburgh. Currently, Kryder’s research focuses on Seagate’s efforts to achieve an areal storage density of 1 terabit/in², about 20 times that available today, and eventually a density of 50 terabits/in² He finds both goals quite reasonable. “For several decades, people have predicted the limits of magnetic recording, and they have all been exceeded,” Kryder says.

Ephraim Suhir
“It is true that a theory without an experiment is dry, but it is equally true that an experiment without a good theory is blind,” says Suhir, who developed analytical models and design methods used widely in the microelectronics and photonics industries. The Ukrainian-born physicist, whose career path was recently described as going “from ships to chips,” began his professional life in the former Soviet Union, where he developed expertise in modeling and the structural analysis of ship and aircraft parts.

After coming to the United States in 1980, Suhir worked for Exxon Corp. and then joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1984. There, he turned his skills to hightech materials and developed “simple, easyto- use but meaningful analytical models that really indicate what affects what, and what is responsible for what.” He also published extensively on the physical behavior and reliability of materials and structures in micro- and optical-electronic systems, thus setting forth the fundamentals of a discipline sometimes called structural analysis in microelectronics and photonics.

After 18 years at Bell Labs, Suhir joined iolon, Inc. (San Jose, CA), as vice president of reliability and packaging, and more recently, he formed his own company, ERS (Los Altos, CA). “We have this material that will have a strong impact in photonics and in some other industries,” Suhir says.

The Forum department is initiated by the American Physical Society’s Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics (FIAP). For more information about the Forum, please visit the FIAP Web site, or contact the chair, Kenneth C. Hass.