Clifford Michael Surko (born October 11, 1941, in Sacramento, California) is an American physicist,[1] whose works involve plasma physics, atomic physics, nonlinear dynamics and solid state physics.
[2][3][4] Together with his colleagues, he developed techniques for laser scattering at small angles to study waves and turbulence in tokamak plasmas and invented a positron trap (buffer gas positron trap) that was used in experiments worldwide to study antimatter.
[9] He was then at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, where he became department head for research in semiconductor and chemical physics in 1982.
[10] He was a visiting researcher at MIT (Plasma Fusion Center, 1977 to 1984), at École Polytechnique (1978/79) and at University College London.
In 2014, he received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for "the invention of and development of techniques to accumulate, confine, and utilize positron plasmas, and for seminal experimental studies of waves and turbulence in tokamak plasmas".