Marty Abkowitz

Marty Abkowitz well known physicist for his research work in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance at Xerox Corporation and at various universities, tragically died at the age of seventy seven(77) in a hit and run DWI accident on January 31, 2014. He received his B.S. with honors from CCNY in 1957 where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received an M.A. in Physics in 1959 from the University of Rochester and his Ph.D. in Physics from Syracuse University in 1964. During the period of 1964-65, Marty was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Physics at the University of Pittsburg. In 1965, Marty joined the Webster Research Center (now the Wilson Center for Research and Technology) of Xerox Corporation where he was a Principal Scientist. Marty chaired Gordon and international research conferences and served on several international research advisory panels. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society and served on the New Materials prize Committee and the Committee on Applications of Physics of that society. Marty served as chair of the New York State Section of the American Physical Society.

He served as Adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester and was a principal investigator at the NSF Science Center on Photo-induced Electron Transfer at the U of R. Marty’s research interests included; injection and interfacial phenomena, electronic transport and the dielectric properties of amorphous semiconductors and disordered molecular and composite materials. In addition, Marty participated in the design of polymer based electronic and transducer devices including imaging receptors. He had about 150 refereed publications, over 250 presentations, and 35 U.S. patents issued or pending.

We have known Marty Abkowitz for many years and carry with us long memories of our association with him. He was a brilliant physicist who had not only a good grasp of quantum physics, dark matter, sub-atomic particles, but also showed excellent depth and breadth in physics of macroscopic world solids of fluids. His zest for knowledge and willingness to listen and debate was amazing.No account of Marty’s life would be complete without a discussion of his substantial contributions to physics and to Xerox. When Marty arrived at Xerox in 1965, the firm was in the process of generating a new “second” generation of Xerox products. One new ingredient was the conversion from single layer photoreceptors (devices which are insulating in the dark but conducting when exposed to light) to multilayer devices based on layers of chalcogenide glasses. These glasses exhibited very low carrier mobilities relative to crystalline semiconductors like single crystal silicon. The mechanisms of charge injection and transport in such materials were topics of hot debate in the solid state physics literature of the time. Marty entered this fray with gusto, designing new experiments and techniques to clarify these mechanisms. He wrote numerous papers on these topics with a wide variety of co-authors, becoming internationally famous in the process. His results were essential in designing the commercial second generation photoreceptor devices. Then in the late 1970s Xerox developed a third generation of products based on multilayer polymer belts. Marty applied his techniques and insights to the materials in these devices as well, leading to the successful design of photoreceptors that served in multiple families of Xerox copiers and printers that dominated the market at 50 pages per minute and above during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Thus he not only made seminal contributions to the mechanisms of charge injection and transport in low mobility solids but also was instrumental in the success of two generations of Xerox products spanning over thirty years. Moreover Marty was a real mensch: kind, thoughtful and generous to all who sought his help. After retiring from Xerox in 1998 he initiated a research group at the University of Rochester to continue his work and in the process inspired another generation of students with his love for experiment and conceptual precision. Few people have contributed more to his associates than Marty.

He could discuss a wide range of subjects varying from current events to philosophy to classical music and great conductors like Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan. He will be sorely missed by many members at APS, members of physics and chemistry faculty at the University of Rochester and by his former colleagues at Xerox.

Suresh Ahuja and C.B. Duke