Mark Stockman: Evangelist for Plasmonics

Abstract

Mark Stockman was a founding member and evangelist for the plasmonics field for most of his creative life. He never sought recognition, but fame came to him in a different way. He will be dearly remembered by colleagues and friends as one of the most influential and creative contributors to the science of light from our generation.■ A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF PROFESSOR MARK STOCKMAN Mark Stockman was born on the 21st of July 1947 in Kharkov, a major cultural, scientific, educational, and industrial center in the mainly Russian-speaking northern Ukraine, a part of the Soviet Union at that point in time. His father, Ilya Stockman, was a mining engineer by training, who fought in World War II and became a highly decorated enlisted officer. After the war, Ilya Stockman embraced an academic career and eventually became a Professor at the Dnepropetrovsk Higher Mining School. He was from a Cantonist family descended from Jewish conscripts to the Russian Imperial army, who were educated in special "canton schools" for future military service.Mark was an avid reader at school, and it was the undergraduate textbook on applied mathematics by Yakov Zeldovich, the famous theoretical physicist, who played a crucial role in the development of the Soviet Union's nuclear bomb project that turned his attention to physics in a serious way.Following successful participation in the national school physics competition, Mark was accepted into a highly selective institution for gifted children in Kiev known as the Republican Specialized Physics and Mathematics Boarding School. The school was established by the father of Soviet cybernetics Victor Glushkov. Mark left his family in Dnepropetrovsk and moved to Kiev as a boarding student. Upon graduating from the school, he successfully applied to the Physics Department of Kiev State University, aided by his reputation as a top student and links between the school and university academics: for a Jewish boy with no family connections, to enter this prestigious university in the Ukrainian capital was a formidable challenge in the Soviet Union. However, after his second year, feeling uncomfortable at the University in Kiev, Mark decided to leave the blessed city for Novosibirsk State University far away in Siberia where a more cosmopolitan atmosphere prevailed at that time. He studied for a diploma in the Institute of Nuclear Physics where after graduation he became a researcher registered as a Ph.D. student. He defended a dissertation on collective phenomena in nuclei under the supervision of Russian theoretical physicists Spartak Belyaev and Vladimir Zelelevinsky. While a Ph.D. candidate, Mark met and married Branislava Mezger, a junior research scientist in biomedicine, and in 1978 they had a son, Dmitry. After a few years in the Institute of Nuclear Physics, Mark became disillusioned with nuclear physics, where research projects involved large groups and implied very long experimental cycles. He moved to the neighboring Institute of Automation and Electrometry in Novosibirsk to work on the fundam...

Three-level Spaser System: a Semi-Classical Analysis

“…I . Stockman [15,16], and throughout the time has paved its way up as a miniature source of spectrally tunable stimulated emission [17,18]. Apart from the mainstream research, spaser has found numerous applications in different areas such as opto-electronic systems [19][20][21][22][23][24][25], sensing in biological and chemical agents [26][27][28] and also as a biological probe [29,30] in disease therapeutics and diagnostics.…”