The first paper on unikernels is pubished at ASPLOS 2013
Unikernels: library operating systems for the cloudAnil Madhavapeddy, Richard Mortier, Charalampos Rotsos, Dave Scott, Balraj Singh, Thomas Gazagnaire, Steven Smith, Steven Hand, and Jon Crowcroft.Paper in the proceedings of the eighteenth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems.URL (dl.acm.org) DOI BIB PDF
Unikernels: library operating systems for the cloud
Anil Madhavapeddy, Richard Mortier, Charalampos Rotsos, Dave Scott, Balraj Singh, Thomas Gazagnaire, Steven Smith, Steven Hand, and Jon Crowcroft.
Paper in the proceedings of the eighteenth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems.
URL (dl.acm.org) DOI BIB PDF
Anil Madhavapeddy, Professor of Planetary Computing 
papers