Navy award

The US Naval Research Laboratory’s highest honor, its E. O. Hulburt Award, has been presented to Edward D. Palik, research physicist in NRL’s Solid State Division. Since coming to NRL in 1958, Dr. Palik has used magneto‐optical methods and the Laboratory’s high magnetic field facility to study the energy‐band structure of semiconductors. His measurements of infrared cyclotron resonance in semiconductors have yielded very precise values for the effective masses of conduction electrons in indium antimonide, indium arsenide, gallium arsenide, and indium phosphide, as well as of light holes in indium antimonide. The first to observe the Voigt effect experimentally in a semiconductor, Dr. Palik demonstrated the theoretically predicted dependence on wave‐length and magnetic field, and showed experimentally that the Voigt effect can be used to study the anisotropy of the effective mass of current carriers. He has also discovered the dependence on free carrier concentration of the interband Faraday rotation, showing that by changing the carrier concentration, the experimenter can drastically alter the rotation and even cause it to change its sign.