Joaquin M. Luttinger, a solid-state physicist who put his mathematical imagination to work on the behavior of electrons, devising theories that have advanced the knowledge of semiconductors and superconductors, died on Sunday at Mount Sinai Medical Center. He was 73 and lived in Morningside Heights in Manhattan.
The cause was myelodysplasia, a cancer of the bone marrow, said his former wife, Abigail Thomas.
Dr. Luttinger was a professor emeritus of physics at Columbia University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Luttinger is best known for his work, begun in the 1960's, on what are called Luttinger liquids, theoretical models in which electrons are able to move in only one dimension instead of three. The theory described the movement of electrons in extremely thin wires or on the edges of molecular structures, predicting that the behavior would be similar to that of a liquid.
''But people didn't pay much attention then because such systems were hardly known,'' said a longtime collaborator of Dr. Luttinger's, Dr. Walter Kohn, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Now, Luttinger liquids interest people working on superconductivity and on very small-scale semiconductors, where electrons' movements are indeed constrained.
''In the ever increasing miniaturization of semiconductor technology,'' Dr. Kohn said, ''people make extremely thin wires, just 10 to 100 atoms across. For electrons running across such wires, for all intents and purposes, they are one-dimensional.''
Dr. Luttinger is also known for work with Dr. Kohn that led to the Luttinger theorem, describing three-dimensional interactions of electrons. This theorem has been important in research on superconductors and metals, Dr. Kohn said.
Joaquin Mazdak Luttinger, known as Quin, was born on Dec. 2, 1923, in New York City. He received a bachelor's degree in 1944 and a doctorate in physics in 1947 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the late 1940's, he was a research assistant to the Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli.
He worked at a number of universities and research institutions, joining Columbia in 1960 and retiring from there in 1993.
While Dr. Luttinger pursued the abstract beauty of mathematical elegance in his work, he was an amateur artist when he relaxed, Ms. Thomas said. He took a two-year sabbatical in the 1970's to paint.
In addition to Ms. Thomas, of Manhattan, Dr. Luttinger is survived by a brother, Lionel, of Andover, N.J.; a sister, Judith Florence of Albuquerque, N.M.; a daughter, Catherine, of Manhattan; three stepchildren, Sarah Waddell of Amagansett, L.I., Jennifer Waddell of Cambridge, Mass., and Ralph Waddell of Shelter Island, L.I., and five grandchildren.
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