Peter J. Price

Peter J. Price, a well-known condensed matter theorist who spent almost 40 years at IBM Watson Laboratories in New York, died on November 30, 2013, in Brunswick, Maine, after a long illness, from complications due to Parkinson’s disease. Peter was particularly active in the study of transport properties in solids, including hot electron physics, transport in hetero-junctions and electron tunneling in semiconductors.

Peter was born on July 29, 1924, in London, UK. After graduating from high school in 1942, he was recruited by the British government into a two-year program in physics and electronics at Oxford, followed by his employment in the Joint Services Laboratory, where he worked on the design and improvement of microwave magnetrons. When the war ended, people in his circumstances were not allowed to return immediately to their career tracks; they had to “get in line” behind those who had been diverted for more than his one year. In 1947, he returned to Oxford to complete his undergraduate degree, followed by his obtaining a doctorate in theoretical physics from Cambridge. His early work on the hydrodynamics of liquid helium earned him a postdoctoral position with Fritz London at Duke University (1951-1952), followed by a fellowship year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

In 1953, he accepted a position at the IBM “Watson Laboratories at Columbia University,” where he was to serve as “house theorist.” The association with Columbia extended to giving regular graduate physics courses there as well as to mentoring several post docs and seven dissertation students (including JBK), for whom he was always unusually accessible and encouraging.

His work there and subsequently at the IBM research laboratory at Yorktown Heights, beginning in 1970, included thermoelectricity, hetero-structures, hot electron and hot phonon effects, including the prediction of giant thermal conductivity in intrinsic semiconductors, investigation of the non-local extension of the ohmic Boltzmann Equation, non-linear optics, electron (Zener) tunneling, semiconductor layered structures, and resonant tunneling. He was a leader in the application of Monte Carlo methods to a range of situations, including diode phenomena, time and space dependence, diffusion, and the electronic phenomena of the Gunn diode (space charge, diffusion, time and space dependence, source and drain boundaries). This work was in collaboration with a visiting scientist (Carlo Jacoboni from Modena, Italy), a postdoc (Paul A. Lebwohl) and an IBM colleague (Al Phillips, Jr.).

Peter’s service to the physics community included membership on the editorial boards of the Physical Review, J. Applied Physics, and the IBM Journal, as well as participation in a heavy schedule of refereeing.

In addition to his significant contributions to our understanding of condensed matter physics, he will be remembered by his friends and colleagues for his wry wit, clever limericks and love of classical music as well as by his dissertation students for all the help and encouragement he provided.

Joseph B. Krieger, City University of New York
Alan B. Fowler, IBM fellow Ret.