Myriam Sarachik

Myriam Paula Sarachik (August 8, 1933 – October 7, 2021) was a Belgian-born American experimental physicist who specialized in low-temperature solid state physics. From 1996, she was a distinguished professor of physics at the City College of New York. She is known for the first experimental confirmation of the Kondo effect in the 1960s.

Early life and education Myriam Sarachik was born Myriam Paula Morgenstein on August 8, 1933, in Antwerp, Belgium. Her parents, Sarah (Segal) and Schloimo Morgenstein, were Orthodox Jews who were born in Poland. Her mother moved to Belgium as a child and her father moved in his mid-teens. Her parents met and married in Belgium. Her father worked as a diamond cutter and diamond dealer. Myriam had two siblings, an older brother Paul and a younger brother Henry. The primary language spoken at home was Yiddish.

The family fled Belgium in 1940 due to the German occupation of Belgium during World War II.

After spending a few weeks in Nice, the family took a train across the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain and stayed in Bilbao before sailing from Vigo to Cuba. In 1947, Sarachik and her family were granted visas to enter the United States and they moved to New York City. She received her M.S. at Columbia University in 1957, and her Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1960, where her advisor was Richard Garwin. Her Ph.D. research was on measuring the attenuation of a magnetic field by Type-I superconducting films. She published results from her doctoral research in Physical Review Letters and the IBM Journal of Research and Development the same year as she received her doctorate.

Academic career From 1962 to 1964 she held a postdoctoral appointment at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. At Bell Laboratories she demonstrated that magnetic impurities in a non-magnetic metal, which form local magnetic moments, can cause the electrical resistance of the alloy to increase at low temperatures. As the temperature lowers, the resistance for most metallic materials will continue to decrease until it reaches a plateau. However, some anomalous metallic materials will have a minimum resistance after which the resistance will increase even as the temperature is lowered. Sarachik showed that there was a one-to-one correspondence between the presence of local magnetic moments and the minimum of the resistance in metallic materials. Some of her research sought to understand the metal-insulator transition, or the conditions under which an insulator can become a conductor. Experiments of this type must be performed near absolute zero.

In 2020, Sarachik was awarded the American Physical Society (APS) Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research for her "contributions to the physics of electronic transport in solids and molecular magnetism". She was president of APS in 2003, and was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize in 2005. In 2008, she was elected to the governing council of the National Academy of Sciences.

She was active in defending the human rights of scientists as a member and chair of the Committee on the International Freedom of Scientists of the APS, a long-time member of the Human Rights of Scientists Committee of the New York Academy of Sciences, and a board member of the Committee of Concerned Scientists.

Honors and awards Sarachik received the following honors: Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1999) Fellow, American Physical Society Recipient, 1995 NYC Mayor's Award for Excellence in Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences Recipient, 2005 APS Oliver E. Buckley Prize in Condensed Matter Prize Recipient, 2023 National Medal of Science

Personal life In 1954, Myriam married Philip Sarachik, a professor of electrical engineering at New York University.

Sarachik died on October 7, 2021, in Manhattan at the age of 88.