Name Stephen Kevan | ||
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Stephen Douglas Kevan is an American physicist.
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Kevan graduated Wesleyan University in 1976 with a BA in chemistry and received his PhD in Physics Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980. Since his initial career appointment at Bell Laboratories as a member of Technical Staff from 1980-1986, he has also served the community in organizing workshops and conferences, participating in many advisory panels and review committees of synchrotron radiation facilities.. From 1986 to 1991 he was an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Oregon and since 1991 as a Professor. From 2007 to 2012, he was appointed Physics Department Head and has also served as Director of the University of Oregon Materials Science Institute. Kevan is currently serving as Deputy Division Director for Science at the Advanced Lights Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is also currently serving as Associate Editor and recently North American Regional Editor of the New Journal of Physics. Kevan's current appointment is the culmination of his 30 years of service to the research community in assuring the health and vitality of synchrotron light sources in the United States and abroad.
Stephen Kevan has made numerous important contributions to condensed matter physics and physical chemistry in the understanding how microscopic interactions and fluctuations conspire to produce novel material properties, particularly in the context of surface and thin film physics and exotic magnetism. His early Fermiology studies using photoemission verified experimentally the Fermi surface nesting mechanism for the spin density wave ground state of chromium and also contributed to our understanding of electronic instabilities in charge density wave materials and surface reconstructions. He also characterized the role of non-adiabatic damping of adsorbate vibrations and the spin-splitting of surface bands by the Rashba (spin-orbit) effect. More recently his interest in probing the microscopic-macroscopic connection has made him a leader in developing tools to study microscopic magnetic fluctuations using coherent soft x-ray beams. His current emphasis is to probe, on the scale of a few domains, intermittent dynamics and memory effects in field- and thermally driven magnetization reversal is highly regarded. Understanding the impact of newly discovered hidden symmetries on these cascades is important to our understanding of microscopic intermittency in a much broader context.