Kenneth John Button (11 October 1922, Rochester, New York – 30 August 2010, Indialantic, Florida) was a solid-state and plasma physicist.
[1] After four years in the U.S. Army Infantry during World War II, Button attended the University of Rochester, where he received his bachelor's degree and then his M.S.
[2] He joined in 1951 MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, where he did research, often in collaboration with Benjamin Lax, on semiconductors by studying their energy band structure using cyclotron resonance.
In 1965 he convinced H. A. Gebbie of the NPL in the UK to bring to the MIT Magnet Lab a copy of the newly discovered 0.337 mm wavelength cyanide laser.
This THz laser spectrometer coupled with magnetic tuning of semiconductor bands opened up a major new field of research that led to many significant publications in the 1960s and 1970s.