Today (March 15, 1930) is the birthday of Zhores Alferov, who discovered that different
materials can be used to make laser light.
Zhores Ivanovich Alferov was born on March 15, 1930, in Vitebsk, Belarus, Soviet Union. Alferov graduated from secondary school in Minsk in 1947 and started Belarusian Polytechnic Academy. In 1952, he received his B.S. from the V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin) Electrotechnical Institute (LETI) in Leningrad. In 1953, Alferov worked in the Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He earned several scientific degrees from the institute: a Candidate of Sciences in Technology in 1961 and a Doctor of Sciences in Physics and Mathematics in 1970.
Starting at Ioffe Institute in 1953, Alferov worked with a group led by Vladimir Tuchkevich. The latter became director of the Ioffe Institute in 1967 on planar semiconductor amplifiers for radio receivers. These planar semiconductor amplifiers would be referred to as transistors today. Alferov's contribution included work on germanium diodes for use as a rectifier. In the early 1960s, Alferov organized an effort at Ioffe Institute to develop semiconductor heterostructures. Semiconductor heterojunctions transistors enabled higher frequency use than their homojunction predecessors, and this capability plays a crucial role in modern mobile phone and satellite communications. Alferov and colleagues worked on GaAs and AlAs III-V heterojunctions. A particular focus was using heterojunctions to create semiconductor lasers capable of lasing at room temperature.
In 1963, Alferov filed a patent application proposing double-heterostructure lasers; Herbert Kroemer independently filed a U.S. patent several months later. In 1966, Alferov's lab created the first lasers based on heterostructures, although they did not lase continuously. Then in 1968, Alferov and coworkers produced the first continuous-wave semiconductor heterojunction laser operating at room temperature. This achievement came a month ahead of Izumo Hayashi and Morton Panish of Bell Labs building a continuous-wave room-temperature heterojunction laser. For this work, Alferov received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Herbert Kroemer, "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and optoelectronics".
In the 1960s and 1970s, Alferov continued his work on the physics and technology of semiconductor heterostructures in his lab at the Ioffe Institute. Alferov's investigations of injection properties of semiconductors and his contributions to the development of lasers, solar cells, LEDs, and epitaxy processes, led to the creation of modern heterojunction physics and electronics. The story of semiconductor heterojunctions revolutionized semiconductor design and had a range of immediate commercial applications, including LEDs, barcode readers and C.D.s. Hermann Grimmeiss of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards Nobel prizes, said: "Without Alferov, it would not be possible to transfer all the information from satellites down to the Earth or have so many telephone lines. Between cities."
Alferov had an almost messianic conception of heterostructures, writing: "Many scientists have contributed to this remarkable progress, which not only determines in large measure the future prospects of solid-state physics but in a certain sense affects the future of human society as well." They are famous for their research into how a laser beam can be combined to make a laser beam. Zhores Alferov, who discovered that different materials can make laser light, passed away on March 1, 2019, at the age of 88 in St. Petersburg.
Source By: Wikipedia
Information: Ramesh, Assistant Professor of Physics, Nehru Memorial College, Puthanampatti, Trichy.
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