Manuel Cardona Castro, the worldwide specialist in the field of solid state physics, has made decisive discoveries in materials physics, the basis for many of the new technologies. His work combines contributions to basic science with key ideas for subsequent applications. Many of his works deal with semiconductors, his studies in which he interprets their properties in terms of electronic interactions being classics.
Cardona was born in Barcelona in 1934, graduating in Physical Sciences in 1955 with "summa cum laude" and subsequently receiving he national prize for the best academic record of all Spain´s science faculties. In 1956 he obtained the Smith-Mundt grant and moved to Harvard University to work as a graduate under the guidance of Professor William Paul. There he began his thesis on the quadratic photomagneto-electric effect in germanium and silicon, with which he was to obtain his doctorate in science from the University of Madrid in 1958. After continuing working on the dielectric properties of germanium and silicon and their dependence on pressure and temperature, he also obtained a doctorate in Applied Physics from Harvard University in 1959. During his studies in this university he obtained the Juan March (1958) and Bell Labs (1959) grants.
Manuel Cardona´s professional career carried on, in the following years, in Switzerland, the USA and Germany. In December 1959 he joined the staff of the RCA laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland, where he was to stay until, in 1961, he moved to the same company´s laboratories in Princeton, USA.
In June 1964 he accepted the post of associate lecturer in Physics at Brown University, being promoted to full lecturer in 1966. In 1971 he moved on to become the director of the newly-founded Max-Planck Solid-State Institute in Stuttgart, FDR.
Prior to this last move, Cardona had received grants from the A.P. Sloan Foundation, between 1965 and 1968, and from Guggenheim in 1969-70. Also, in 1963 and 1965 respectively, he taught in the universities of Pennsylvania and Buenos Aires, in the latter under the auspices of the Ford Foundation.
He has been a member of the editorial boards of the following scientific publications "Physica Status Solid" and "Solid State Communications" since 1972, and since 1975 of the "Springer Series in Solid State Physics". Between 1974 and 1978 he was likewise a contributor to the "Journal of Physics C.", of which he is now a member of the Executive Council. Since 1979 he has been an Associate Editor of "Physical Review Letters" and Chief Associate Editor of "Solid State Communications".
Cardona has belonged to the Revision Committee for Condensed Material Physics of the German National Science Foundation, to the Council of the German Physics Society, the Scientific Council of DESY (Hamburg), of the National centre for Telecommunications Studies (Paris), the Institute of Surface Science (Jülich, Germany), and belongs to the Academy of Sciences of the United States and that of Barcelona. He has likewise formed part of the programme committees of all the International Conferences in Montpelier 1982 and Stockholm 1986. He received a grant from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science in 1984, and from the Yamada Foundation from 1983 on.
A doctor "honoris causa" of the University of Madrid and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, honourary professor of Stuttgart University, Germany and honourary member of the American Physics Society, Manuel Cardona received the RCA Laboratories Prize in 1962, the Narcís Monturios Medal for Scientific Achievement in 1982, the Frank Isacson Prize in 1984, the Johanes M. von Kronland Medal (Czechoslovakia) in 1988, and the Prize of the Catalan Research Foundation in 1990.
An advisor to RCA Laboratories (Princeton, New Jersey), GTE (Waltham, Massachusetts), IBM (Yorktown Heights, New York and Palo Alto, California) and XEROX PARC (Palo Alto, California), he is the author or co-author of more than six hundred articles on scientific subjects and of the books "Modulación espectroscópica", "Dispersión de la luz en sólidos" (6 volumes) and "Fotoemisión en sólidos" (2 volumes).