Manuel Cardona


Manuel Cardona Castro was a condensed matter physicist. According to the ISI Citations web database, Cardona was one of the eight most cited physicists since 1970. He specialized in solid state physics. Cardona's main interests were in the fields of: Raman scattering as applied to semiconductor microstructures, materials with tailor-made isotopic compositions, and high Tc superconductors, particularly investigations of electronic and vibronic excitations in the normal and superconducting state.

Academic career

Cardona was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1934. After obtaining a Masters in physics in 1955 from University of Barcelona Cardona was awarded a fellowship to work as a graduate student at Harvard University starting in 1956. At Harvard he began investigations of the dielectric properties of semiconductors, in particular germanium and silicon. With this work as a thesis he received a PhD in Applied Physics at Harvard. From 1959 till 1961 he continued similar work on III-V semiconductors at the RCA Laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1961 he moved to the RCA Labs in Princeton, NJ, where he continued work on the optical properties of semiconductors and started investigations of the microwave properties of superconductors. In 1964 he became a member of the Physics Faculty of Brown University. In June–September 1965 he taught at the University of Buenos Aires under the auspices of the Ford Foundation. In 1971 he moved to Stuttgart, Germany as a founding director of the then-recently created Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. Concomitantly he became scientific Member of the Max Planck Society, where he became emeritus in 2000.
From 1992 to 2004, Cardona served as chief editor of Solid State Communications.

Distinctions and honors

Besides receiving over at least 61 awards during his career, Cardona held eleven honorary doctorates. Some notable honors include:
Cardona has authored over 1,300 scientific publications in international journals, ten monographs on solid state physics and co-authored a textbook on semiconductors. Since 1972, Cardona has served on the Board of Editors of at least seven journals, including being the Editor-in-Chief of Solid State Communications from 1992 to 2005.
Some of his works include:
  • Manuel Cardona: Modulation Spectroscopy, Academic Press 1969. Lib of Congress 55-12299
  • Manuel Cardona, Gernot Günterodt and Roberto Merlin: Light Scattering in Solids I-IX Springer Verlag;
  • Pere Bonnin: Manuel Cardona i Castro, Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca, Barcelona 1998
  • Peter Y. Yu and Manuel Cardona, Fundamentals of semiconductors, 4 editions 1996-2000,

    Personal life

Cardona died in Stuttgart on 2 July 2014, where he lived since 1971 with his wife Inge Cardona. He held American, German and Spanish citizenship and had 3 children and 7 grandchildren.