Evan O'Neill Kane (December 23, 1924 – March 23, 2006), known as E. O. Kane in his publications, was an American physicist who established some of the basic understanding of the theory of

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical conductivity value falling between that of a conductor, such as copper, and an insulator, such as glass. Its resistivity falls as its temperature rises; metals behave in the opposite way. ...

s 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 great, great uncle,

Elisha Kent Kane Elisha Kent Kane (February 3, 1820 – February 16, 1857) was a United States Navy medical officer and Arctic explorer. He served as assistant surgeon during Caleb Cushing's journey to China to negotiate the Treaty of Wangxia and in the Af ...

, was an arctic explorer, writing books in the 1850s about his journeys. His great grandfather, Thomas Leiper Kane, who founded the town of

Kane, Pennsylvania Kane is a borough in McKean County in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, east by southeast of Erie. It was founded in 1864 by Civil War General Thomas L. Kane of the famous Bucktail Regiment at an elevated site 2210 feet (674 m) above sea level. ...

, was an

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states ...

General. He also helped with the

Underground Railroad The Underground Railroad was a network of clandestine routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early- to mid-19th century. It was used by enslaved African Americans primarily to escape into free states and Canada. ...

and successfully urged the Buchanan Administration not to go to war with the Mormons in

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City (often shortened to Salt Lake and abbreviated as SLC) is the capital and most populous city of Utah, United States. It is the seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in Utah. With a population of 200,133 in 2020, th ...

. Kane's grandfather, also named

Evan O'Neill Kane Evan O'Neill Kane (April 6, 1861 – April 1, 1932) was an American physician and surgeon from the 1880s to the early 1930s who served as chief of surgery at Kane Summit Hospital in Kane, Pennsylvania. He was a significant contributor in his da ...

, was a doctor who was so enamoured of the idea of

local anesthesia Local anesthesia is any technique to induce the absence of sensation in a specific part of the body, generally for the aim of inducing local analgesia, that is, local insensitivity to pain, although other local senses may be affected as well. It ...

that he surgically removed his own appendix to show its effectiveness.

Life

Evan O'Neill Kane was born on December 23, 1924 in

. 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 Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

, and interrupted his education to serve in the army during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

. He graduated from

in 1948, and went directly to

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

to study towards his PhD in physics, which was awarded in 1953 on an experimental project related to

vacuum tube A vacuum tube, electron tube, valve (British usage), or tube (North America), is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric potential difference has been applied. The type known as ...

technology. Kane then joined the

General Electric Research Laboratory General Electric Research Laboratory was the first industrial research facility in the United States. Established in 1900, the lab was home to the early technological breakthroughs of General Electric and created a research and development environm ...

in Schenectady, New York. There he began contributing to the theoretical underpinnings of the then-new field of

research. 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. Kane left General Electric in 1959 to join

Hughes Aircraft The Hughes Aircraft Company was a major American aerospace and defense contractor founded on February 14, 1934 by Howard Hughes in Glendale, California, as a division of Hughes Tool Company. The company was known for producing, among other pro ...

in California and then moved to the Theoretical Physics Department in

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

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 AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile te ...

was broken up. He then worked for

BellCore iconectiv is a supplier of network planning and network management services to telecommunications providers. Known as Bellcore after its establishment in the United States in 1983 as part of the break-up of the Bell System, the company's name ...

until he retired in 1984.

Personal life

Kane married Anne Bassler in 1950 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They lived together for over 40 years in

New Providence, New Jersey New Providence is a borough on the northwestern edge of Union County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It is located on the Passaic River, which forms the county boundary with Morris County bordering Chatham Township. As of the 2020 United S ...

, where they raised three children and coauthored one paper. 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 died in 2006 at the age of 81. The cause of death was complications secondary to

myeloproliferative disease Myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs) are a group of rare blood cancers in which excess red blood cells, white blood cells or platelets are produced in the bone marrow. ''Myelo'' refers to the bone marrow, ''proliferative'' describes the rapid grow ...

and

myelodysplasia A myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) is one of a group of cancers in which immature blood cells in the bone marrow do not mature, and as a result, do not develop into healthy blood cells. Early on, no symptoms typically are seen. Later, symptoms may ...

. He had three children.

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 solid-state physics, the valence band and conduction band are the bands closest to the Fermi level, and thus determine the electrical conductivity of the solid. In nonmetals, the valence band is the highest range of electron energies in w ...

in sp³ bonded semiconductors: the

group A group is a number of persons or things that are located, gathered, or classed together. Groups of people * Cultural group, a group whose members share the same cultural identity * Ethnic group, a group whose members share the same ethnic ide ...

IV, III-V and II-VI semiconductors. This 1957 publication is still prominent in scientific literature and textbooks more than 50 years after its discovery (the paper has about 3377 citations despite the fact that modern

citation index A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebre ...

es undercount citations for papers published before the mid-1990s). 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 WillatzenLok C. Lew Yan Voon and Morten Willatzen, "The k.p Method" Electronic Properties of Semiconductors, Springer, Springer-Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009. devote several chapters to explaining Kane models. They note that Kane's quasi-degenerate

perturbation theory In mathematics and applied mathematics, perturbation theory comprises methods for finding an approximate solution to a problem, by starting from the exact solution of a related, simpler problem. A critical feature of the technique is a middl ...

approach worked well for semiconductors with small

band gap In solid-state physics, a band gap, also called an energy gap, is an energy range in a solid where no electronic states can exist. In graphs of the electronic band structure of solids, the band gap generally refers to the energy difference ( ...

s. 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 (GaAs). 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

* Kane, E. O. (1956). "ENERGY BAND STRUCTURE IN P-TYPE GERMANIUM AND SILICON." Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids 1(1-2): 82-99. (cited by 721Citation statistics retrieved from

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes ...

, 28 February 2017) * Kane, E. O. (1957). "BAND STRUCTURE OF INDIUM ANTIMONIDE." Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids 1(4): 249-261. (cited by 3377) * Kane, E. O. (1959). "THE SEMI-EMPIRICAL APPROACH TO BAND STRUCTURE." Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids 8: 38-44. (cited by 28) * Kane, E. O. (1959). "ZENER TUNNELING IN SEMICONDUCTORS." Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids 12(2): 181-188. (cited by 749) * Kane, E. O. (1961). "THEORY OF TUNNELING." Journal of Applied Physics 32(1): 83-&. (cited by 778) * Kane, E. O. (1963). "THOMAS-FERMI APPROACH TO IMPURE SEMICONDUCTOR BAND STRUCTURE." Physical Review 131(1): 79-&. (cited by 691) * Kane, E. O. (1967). "ELECTRON SCATTERING BY PAIR PRODUCTION IN SILICON." Physical Review 159(3): 624-&. (cited by 481) * Chandrasekhar, M., Cardona, M. and Kane, E. O. (1977). "INTRABAND RAMAN-SCATTERING BY FREE CARRIERS IN HEAVILY DOPED N-SI." Physical Review B 16(8): 3579-3595. (cited by 66) * Kane, E. O. and A. B. Kane (1978). "DIRECT CALCULATION OF WANNIER FUNCTIONS - SI VALENCE BANDS." Physical Review B 17(6): 2691-2704. (cited by 53) * Baraff, G. A., E. O. Kane and M. Schlueter (1980). "THEORY OF THE SILICON VACANCY - AN ANDERSON NEGATIVE-U SYSTEM." Physical Review B 21(12): 5662-5686. (cited by 447)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kane, Evan ONeill 1924 births 2006 deaths United States Army personnel of World War II Princeton University alumni Cornell University alumni 20th-century American physicists Semiconductor physicists Scientists from Pennsylvania People from Daytona Beach, Florida People from Union County, New Jersey People of the Cold War History of science and technology in the United States United States Army soldiers Military personnel from Pennsylvania Fellows of the American Physical Society