- Person
- Zhores Alferov
- Lived
- 1930–2019
- Field
- Semiconductor physics
- From
- Soviet and Russian
The story
Zhores Alferov was born in 1930 in Vitebsk, Belarus, to a Belarusian father and a Jewish mother, Anna Rosenblum. He joined the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad in 1953, where his young team made the first Soviet transistors and power rectifiers.
Early semiconductor lasers, made from a single material, needed very large currents and could not run continuously at room temperature, because the electrons and light inside them spread out. In 1963 Alferov proposed the double heterostructure: a thin layer of one semiconductor sandwiched between layers of another, which traps both the electrons and the light in the middle. Herbert Kroemer in the United States independently made the same proposal a few months later. To build it, Alferov’s group used gallium arsenide and aluminium gallium arsenide, materials whose crystal lattices match almost perfectly.
In 1968 and 1969 his group demonstrated the key advantages of heterostructures in lasers, light-emitting diodes, solar cells and transistors, and in 1968 they produced the first continuous-wave heterostructure laser operating at room temperature, about a month ahead of a team at Bell Labs. Alferov called it a rare example of open and friendly competition between laboratories of the rival superpowers. Together with low-loss optical fibre, such lasers made fibre-optic communication practical.
In 2000 Alferov and Kroemer shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed and opto-electronics; the other half went to Jack Kilby for the integrated circuit. The Nobel committee said their inventions laid the foundation of modern information technology. Heterostructure laser diodes drive the flow of information through the internet’s fibre-optic cables and are found in CD players and barcode readers; fast heterostructure transistors are used in satellite links and mobile phone base stations; and heterostructure LEDs light traffic signals and car brake lights. Alferov’s laboratory also made heterostructure solar cells in 1970 that were soon powering Soviet satellites and, for many years, the Mir space station.
Why it matters
Heterostructure lasers, LEDs and transistors pioneered by Alferov are in the fibre-optic networks, phones, barcode scanners, lights and satellites that billions of people use every day.
About Zhores Alferov
Soviet physicist whose layered semiconductor heterostructures made possible the laser diodes of fibre-optic internet, CD and barcode readers, bright LEDs and efficient solar cells. Nobel Prize 2000.
Sources
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2000 NobelPrize.org
- Zhores I. Alferov, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Zhores Alferov Wikipedia
- Алфёров Жорес Электронная еврейская энциклопедия (ORT)
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.