RICHARD P. FENYMAN'S SIGNED & ANNOTATED COPY OF KITTEL'S "INTRO TO SOLID STATE PHYSICS" WITH 1 P MS, CA 1962

Autograph manuscript, 1 p, (8 1/2 x 11 in), in pencil on verso of an invitation flyer to a PhD party for prominent astrophysicist and NASA astronaut Frank Curtis Michel, who received both his BS and PhD degrees (in 1962) in physics at Caltech. WITH: KITTEL, CHARLES. Introduction to Solid State Physics. New York: John Wiley & Sons, [1953]. SIGNED "R.P. FEYNMAN" ON FRONT FLYLEAF, WITH DIAGRAMS AND NOTES IN FEYNMAN'S HAND TO PAGE 116.

Another excellent example of Feynman's habit of working out problems on the closest piece of paper at hand. The calculations on verso of invitation flyer involve summing over contributions of individual electric moments thereby determining, off-axis & on axis, the net electric field created by a one-dimensional crystalline lattice of dipoles. Kittel's book, published by the Berkeley physicist in 1953 (shortly after Feynman had arrived at Caltech...), became the premier graduate-level [and research-grade] text in solid-state physics for the next 25+ years.  Post-QED success, and amidst the excitement the new semiconductor & transistor physics in the mid-50’s, Feynman went hunting for new types of problems to work on.  It was during this period that he published his celebrated paper “Slow Electrons in a Polar Crystal,” Phys. Rev. 97, 660 (1955), which utilized his favorite versatile trick of the Variational Method, beautifully handled later with great pedagogical detail as Ch. 8- “The Polaron Problem,” in his advanced text on Statistical Mechanics (lot 91). This is a gorgeous bit of solid-state physics & it is no surprise, at all, that Kittel was his "go-to" solid-state book at this time.

The notes made by Feynman in Kittel pertain to a diagram showing the perovskite crystal structure of barium titanate.