John Robert Kirtley is an American condensed matter physicist and a Consulting Professor at the Center for Probing the Nanoscale in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University.
Education
He received his Bachelor in Physics in 1971 and his Doctor of Philosophy in Physics in 1976, both from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His Doctor of Philosophy topic was inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy, with Paul Hansma as his thesis advisor.
Career
He was then a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania from 1976–1978, working in the group of Donald North. Langenberg on non-equilibrium superconductivity. From 1978 to 2006 he was a Research Staff Member at the International Business Machines Corporation Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New New York He has worked in the fields of Surface Enhanced Raman scattering, light emission from tunnel junctions and electron injection devices, noise in semiconducting devices, scanning tunneling microscopy and scanning SQUID microscopy.
They have one son, the writer David Barr Kirtley.
The citation was for "using phase-sensitive experiments in the elucidation of the orbital symmetry of the pairing function in high-Tc superconductors". Kirtley, Tsuei, and co-workers used scanning SQUID imaging of the half-integer flux quantum effect in tricrystal samples to demonstrate that cuprate high temperature superconductors have predominantly d-wave pairing symmetry.