A Belarusian-Jewish family
Zhores Ivanovich Alferov was born on March 15, 1930, in Vitebsk, in Soviet Belarus, into what the Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia describes as a Jewish-Belarusian family. His mother, Anna Vladimirovna Rosenblum, came from a Jewish family; his father, Ivan Karpovich Alferov, was Belarusian. He was named after the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès, and his older brother was named Marx.
His father had come to Saint Petersburg at 18 in 1912 and worked as a docker and factory hand, served as a cavalry non-commissioned officer in the First World War, joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and rose to command a Red Army regiment. After graduating from the Industrial Academy in 1935 he managed factories across the country, and the family moved with him from Stalingrad to Novosibirsk, Barnaul and towns near Leningrad and in the Urals. His mother worked as a librarian and led a public organisation of housewives.
War and a ruined city
On June 21, 1941, the day before Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Alferov’s brother Marx graduated from high school. He soon left his engineering studies to fight, survived Stalingrad and the Battle of Kursk, and was killed in 1944 at the age of 20 in the Korsun-Shevchenko battle in Ukraine. Alferov never forgot the three days his brother spent with the family on his way back to the front in 1943, talking about the war and his faith in science and human intelligence.
After the war the family moved to Minsk, which lay in ruins. At a boys’ school there an inspiring physics teacher, Yakov Borisovich Meltserson, held a class of unruly boys spellbound with explanations of oscilloscopes and radar, and advised Alferov to study at the Ulyanov Electrotechnical Institute in Leningrad. There, as a third-year student, he began research on semiconductors, which became the focus of his life.
The young Ioffe Institute
When Alferov arrived at the Physico-Technical Institute on January 30, 1953, it was a small place: his pass was number 429, roughly the size of the whole staff. Its founder, Abram Ioffe, whose textbook Alferov had studied, had just been dismissed, and many leading physicists had left for the atomic projects in Moscow. Yet the young team around Vladimir Tuchkevich, which Alferov joined, worked with passion. Alferov’s laboratory notebook recorded the creation of the first Soviet p-n junction transistor on March 5, 1953, and by May the first Soviet transistor radio receivers were shown to the authorities. He never forgot one of his first seminars there, at which Evgenii Gross described the discovery of the exciton, a new kind of particle-like excitation in crystals.
The Ioffe Institute would be his scientific home for the rest of his career. His small team under Vladimir Tuchkevich went on to build the first Soviet germanium power rectifiers. In 1958 his team was asked to produce special semiconductor devices for the first Soviet nuclear submarine in record time; he moved into the laboratory to finish the job.
From that early work Alferov drew a lesson he kept all his life: to respect technology and the so-called minor details of experiments, and to explain results from simple general laws before reaching for complicated explanations. His candidate thesis in 1961, on germanium and silicon power rectifiers, helped found Soviet power electronics, and led him directly to the idea of heterostructure lasers.
By the early 1960s he had become convinced that the future of semiconductor electronics lay not in devices made of a single material but in heterostructures: sandwiches of different semiconductors, layered with atomic precision, that could steer electrons and light in ways no single material could.
Heterostructures and the laser diode
A laser diode makes light when electrons and holes, their positively charged counterparts, meet and recombine inside a semiconductor. In early devices made of a single material, the electrons and the light spread out, so the lasers needed very large currents and could not run continuously at room temperature. In 1963 Alferov filed a patent application for the double heterostructure laser, in which a thin layer of one semiconductor is sandwiched between layers of another, trapping both the electrons and the light in the middle layer. Herbert Kroemer in the United States proposed the same idea independently a few months later.
Making it work required finding two materials whose crystal lattices matched almost perfectly. Alferov’s group used gallium arsenide and aluminium gallium arsenide, and in 1968 and 1969 they demonstrated the whole family of effects that heterostructures made possible. In 1968 they produced the first heterostructure laser to work continuously at room temperature, about a month ahead of a team at Bell Labs, in what Alferov called a rare example of open and friendly competition between laboratories of rival superpowers. When he presented the results in the United States in 1969, he recalled, they struck American colleagues like an exploding bomb. In 1972 he and his colleagues received the Lenin Prize.
Light for the information age
The Nobel committee said that Alferov and Kroemer, together with Jack Kilby, inventor of the integrated circuit, laid the foundation of modern information technology. Laser diodes built with heterostructure technology drive the flow of information through the internet’s fibre-optic cables; continuous room-temperature lasers, together with low-loss optical fibre, made fibre-optic communication practical. The same lasers are found in CD players, barcode readers and laser pointers. Fast heterostructure transistors are used in satellite links and the base stations of mobile telephone networks.
Heterostructures also gave the world efficient light-emitting diodes, now used in traffic lights, car lights, screens and household lighting, and high-efficiency solar cells. Alferov’s laboratory made heterostructure solar cells in 1970; they were soon flying on Soviet satellites and for many years powered the Mir space station. In 2000 he wrote that solar cells on such heterostructures were still the most effective energy source in space. A member of the Swedish Academy said that without Alferov it would not be possible to transfer all the information from satellites down to Earth or to have so many telephone lines between cities. Work on quantum wells and quantum dots, smaller relatives of his heterostructures, continued at the Ioffe Institute under his students.
A friendship across the Iron Curtain
In August 1969 Alferov visited the United States for the first time, presenting his room-temperature lasers at a conference in Newark, Delaware, and touring the laboratories of Bell Telephone and IBM. In the winter and spring of 1970 and 1971 he spent six months at the University of Illinois with Nick Holonyak, the inventor of the first visible semiconductor laser and LED. They had first met in 1967, when Holonyak visited Leningrad, and they remained close friends for more than three decades, an example of the scientific ties that crossed Cold War lines.
Over his career Alferov was credited with some 50 inventions and more than 500 scientific papers. He received the Franklin Institute’s Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1971, the Lenin Prize in 1972, the USSR State Prize in 1984 and the Kyoto Prize in 2001, in addition to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000, which he shared with Herbert Kroemer and Jack Kilby.
Building schools for science
Alferov became director of the Ioffe Institute in 1987, president of the Leningrad Scientific Centre in 1989 and vice-president of the Academy of Sciences in 1990. He cared deeply about training young scientists. In 1987 he and colleagues founded a physics and technology secondary school in Saint Petersburg linked to the Ioffe Institute, and in 1997 he founded a research and education centre that in 2002 became the Saint Petersburg Academic University, which he led and which focused on nanotechnology. He also argued consistently for science funding.
Heritage, politics and beliefs
Alferov’s Jewish heritage came through his mother, Anna Rosenblum, from a shtetl in what is now the Minsk region of Belarus. He grew up in an intensely Soviet household, and his public identity was that of a Soviet scientist. He was an atheist and opposed religious education in schools; he was among the signatories of an open letter from members of the Russian Academy of Sciences to President Vladimir Putin protesting what they called the growing clericalisation of Russia.
He also had a long political career. He was elected to the State Duma in 1995 for the pro-Yeltsin party Our Home Is Russia, and from 1999 was re-elected repeatedly on the list of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, although he was not a party member; he sat in the Duma until his death. In parliament he was a consistent advocate for science funding and for Russia’s nanotechnology programme.
Family and legacy
In 1967 he married Tamara Darskaya, who worked at a space enterprise near Moscow; they had a son, Ivan, born in 1972 on the day his father received the Lenin Prize, and a daughter, Olga. His father, told of the prize, replied that the more important news was that his grandson had been born.
Alferov died in Saint Petersburg on March 1, 2019, aged 88. Few scientists of his era did more to shape daily life. Every time someone streams a video over fibre-optic cable, scans a barcode at a checkout or switches on an LED lamp, they use technology that grew from his insistence, in the early 1960s, that the future of electronics would be built from layers.
Sources & further reading
Zhores I. Alferov, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2000, NobelPrize.org · Алфёров Жорес, Электронная еврейская энциклопедия (Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia, ORT) · Zhores Alferov, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.