Shulim M. Kogan

Shulim Meerovitch Kogan died on October 20, 2014 in Palo Alto, California. He was born on January 20, 1930 in Bessarabia, Akkerman, which formerly belonged to the Russian Empire but at the time was part of Romania prior to its acquisition by the Soviet Union in 1940. When it was captured by German and Romanian troops in 1941, the Kogan family fled to Odessa and, shortly before the surrender of Odessa in October 1941, escaped by boat to Novorossiysk. They then settled in Kazakhstan, where Shulim and his brother attended secondary school. In 1945 the family returned to Akkerman (the city was then called Belgorod-Dnestrovsky), where Shulim graduated from secondary school in 1948 and enrolled in the Ural State University, graduating with honors in 1953. In 1956, after teaching physics in a secondary school, he began graduate study at Moscow State University, and upon defending his thesis in 1959 began working as a theoretical physicist at the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he spent most of his career.

Kogan carried out pioneering and internationally acclaimed work on a broad range of topics, especially relating to the theory of fluctuations and noise. Together with A. Ya Shulman he developed a general method for treating fluctuations in non-equilibrium, hot-electron systems that has served as a foundation for much further work on the physics of nanosystems. Its fundamental importance is evidenced by a large number of citations, including a reference to it in Volume 10 (Physical Kinetics) of the Landau-Lifshitz Course of Theoretical Physics. He worked extensively on various aspects of low-frequency (1/f) noise in solids, including spin glasses and weakly coupled superconductors, and some of this work is described in his masterful book, Electronic Noise and Fluctuations in Solids (Cambridge University Press, 1996; reprinted in 2008). Among his other pioneering work were studies with colleagues in the Soviet Union on the theory of anisotropic photoconductivity, the spectroscopy of impurities in semiconductors, and the electronic photo-thermo-magnetic effect, and many others.

From 1992 to 2003 Kogan worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he began focusing more on applied physics. He worked on the theory of charge injection into organic semiconductors, which proved to be important for understanding the operation of organic light emitting diodes and of ballistic-electron emission microscopy of buried semiconductor heterostructures. He also worked on various aspects of ultrasound propagation through irregular media. He developed comprehensive theories for noninvasive characterization of fluids inside hidden cavities, manipulation of particles using acoustic radiation forces in non-spherical cavities, and separation of particles and binary gas mixtures using acoustic forces, to list just a few of his accomplishments. In 2005, near the end of his active involvement in research, he returned once more to the study of quantum noise and published a paper in which the theory of the fluctuations of van der Waals forces between macroscopic bodies was rigorously developed.

“Sasha” Kogan leaves behind his wife Ludmila and daughter Elena. He is warmly remembered by all who knew him not only as an outstanding scientist but as an honest man of uncompromising integrity.

Gennady P. Berman
Gary D. Doolen
Peter W. Milonni
Dipen N. Sinha
Darry L. G. Smith