A to Z of Physicists, Updated Edition

Darryl Leiter

Description

A to Z of Physicists, Updated Edition focuses not only on the lives and personalities of those profiled, but also on their research and contributions to the field. A fascinating and important element of this work is the attention paid to the obstacles that minority physicists had to overcome to reach their personal and professional goals. Through incidents, quotations, and photographs, the entries portray something of the human face, which is often lost in books on science and scientists.

A to Z of Physicists, Updated Edition features more than 150 entries and 51 black-and-white photographs. Culturally inclusive and spanning the whole range of physicists from ancient times to the present day, this is an ideal resource for students and general readers interested in the history of physics or the significant aspects of the personal and professional lives of important physicists.

People covered include:

• Archimedes (ca. 285–212 BCE)


• Homi Jehangir Bhabha (1909–1966)


• Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov (1904–1990)


• Marie Curie (1867–1934)


• George Gamow (1904–1968)


• Tsung Dao Lee (1926–present)


• Lise Meitner (1878–1968)


• Yuval Ne'eman (1925–2006)


• Johannes Stark (1874–1957)


• Nikola Tesla (1856–1943)


• Alessandro Volta (1745–1827)


• Hideki Yukawa (1907–1981)

Sujets

• Young Adult Nonfiction
• Sciences et techniques
• Biography
• Outline of physical science
• Physics
• Scientist
• History
• Nature
• Science
• Physique
• Physical attractiveness

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438183312
• Langue: English

Extrait

A to Z of Physicists, Updated Edition
Copyright © 2019 by Darryl J. Leiter
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, contact:
Facts On File An imprint of Infobase 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001
ISBN 978-1-4381-8331-2
You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.infobase.com
Contents Entries Alferov, Zhores Ivanovich Alfv n, Hannes Olof G sta Alvarez, Luis Walter Amp re, Andr -Marie Anderson, Carl David Anderson, Philip Warren ngstr m, Anders Jonas Archimedes of Syracuse Bardeen, John Barish, Barry C. Barkla, Charles Glover Becquerel, Antoine-Henri Bernoulli, Daniel Bethe, Hans Albrecht Bhabha, Homi Jehangir Blackett, Baron Patrick Bloch, Felix Bloembergen, Nicolaas Bohr, Niels Boltzmann, Ludwig Eduard Born, Max Boyle, Willard Bridgman, Percy Williams Broglie, Louis de Carnot, Nicolas-L onard-Sadi Cavendish, Henry Chadwick, Sir James Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan Cherenkov, Pavel Alekseyevich Chu, Steven Clausius, Rudolf Cockcroft, John Douglas Compton, Arthur Holly Cornell, Eric Coulomb, Charles-Augustin de Curie, Marie Davisson, Clinton Joseph Dirac, Paul Doppler, Christian Dyson, Freeman Einstein, Albert Englert, Francois Faraday, Michael Fermi, Enrico Feynman, Richard P. Fitch, Val Logsdon FitzGerald, George Francis Fizeau, Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Foucault, Jean-Bernard-L on Franck, James Fraunhofer, Joseph von Fresnel, Augustin-Jean Gabor, Dennis Galilei, Galileo Gamow, George Gauss, Carl Friedrich Geiger, Hans Wilhelm Geim, Andre Gell-Mann, Murray Glaser, Donald Arthur Glashow, Sheldon Lee Gonzalez, Gabriela Haldane, F. Duncan M. Hawking, Stephen Heisenberg, Werner Karl Helmholtz, Hermann von Henry, Joseph Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf Higgs, Peter W. Hooke, Robert Huygens, Christiaan Josephson, Brian David Joule, James Prescott Kajita, Takaaki Kamerlingh Onnes, Heike Kao, Charles Kapitsa, Pyotr Leonidovich Ketterle, Wolfgang Kilby, Jack Kirchhoff, Gustav Robert Kosterlitz, J. Michael Kroemer, Herbert Kusch, Polykarp Lamb, Willis Eugene, Jr. Landau, Lev Davidovich Land , Alfred Langevin, Paul Laue, Max von Lederman, Leon M. Lee, Tsung-Dao Lenard, Philipp E. A. von Lenz, Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lord Kelvin Lord Rayleigh Lorentz, Hendrik Antoon Mach, Ernst Mather, John Maxwell, James Clerk Mayer, Maria Gertrude Goeppert McDonald, Arthur B. Meitner, Lise Michelson, Albert Abraham Millikan, Robert Andrews M ssbauer, Rudolf Ludwig Mott, Sir Nevill Francis Ne eman, Yuval Nernst, Walther Hermann Newton, Sir Isaac Novoselov, Konstantin Ohm, Georg Simon Oppenheimer, J. Robert rsted, Hans Christian Pauli, Wolfgang Penzias, Arno Allan Perlmutter, Saul Perrin, Jean-Baptiste Planck, Max Poynting, John Henry Purcell, Edward Mills Rabi, Isidor Isaac Raman, Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Ramsey, Norman F. Reines, Frederick Richter, Burton Riess, Adam R ntgen, Wilhelm Conrad Rubbia, Carlo Rutherford, Sir Ernest Rydberg, Johannes Robert Sakharov, Andrei Dmitriyevich Salam, Abdus Schawlow, Arthur Leonard Schmidt, Brian Schrieffer, John Robert Schr dinger, Erwin Schwinger, Julian Seymour Segr , Emilio Gino Shockley, William Bradford Smith, George Smoot, George Snell, Willebrord Sommerfeld, Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Stark, Johannes Stefan, Josef Stern, Otto Stokes, George Gabriel t Hooft, Gerard Taylor, Joseph H., Jr. Teller, Edward Tesla, Nikola Thomson, Sir J. J. Thorne, Kip S. Thouless, David J. Ting, Samuel C. C. Tomonaga, Sin-Itiro Townes, Charles Hard Van Allen, James Van de Graaff, Robert Jemison Van Vleck, John Housbrook Veltman, Martinus J. G. Volta, Alessandro Weber, Wilhelm Eduard Weinberg, Steven Weiss, Rainer Wheeler, John Archibald Wieman, Carl Edwin Wien, Wilhelm Wigner, Eugene Paul Wilson, C. T. R. Wu, Chien-Shiung Yang, Chen Ning Young, Thomas Yukawa, Hideki Zeeman, Pieter
Entries
Alferov, Zhores Ivanovich
(b. 1930– )
experimentalist, solid state physicist

Zhores Alferov is a major figure in solid state physics, whose groundbreaking work on semiconductors led to the creation of the physics of modern miniaturized electronic devices such as cell phones, pagers, and compact disc (CD) players. For this work he shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics with two other pioneers in information and communications technology, Herbert Kroemer and Jack St. Clair Kilby.
He was born on March 15, 1930, in Vitebsk, Belorussia, in what was then the Soviet Union, to Anna Vladimirovna, a librarian and head of a public organization of homemakers, and Ivan Karpovich, a factory director and a Communist Party member, who told Zhores and his brother tales of his exploits in the civil war. He attended a boys' school in Minsk, which had been devastated in World War II, where an inspiring physics teacher helped him find his calling and advised him to apply for admission to the celebrated V. I. Ulyanov [Lenin] Electrotechnical Institute in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). Although he found theoretical physics "easy enough," he was attracted to laboratory work and began the research on semiconductors, that is, materials such as silicon or germanium that have a resistivity midway between that of conductors and that of insulators, that would become his life's work. In 1952 he graduated from the Department of Electronics, after completing a thesis on the problem of obtaining thin films.
He was offered the opportunity to stay on but instead accepted a position at the Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad, under the leadership of Abram F. Ioffe in 1953 as a junior researcher in the recently organized semiconductor laboratory. He considered this "lucky chance" to work with the elite of his chosen field the cause of his "happy scientific career." By May 1953, the first Soviet transistor receivers had been developed and Alferov began to comprehend the significance of the technology for electronic devices as well as basic research. Within the next few years his group developed the first Soviet high-power germanium rectifiers and germanium and silicon photodiodes, used in modern electronic devices. He was part of the team that developed a special semiconductor device for the first Soviet atomic submarine in 1958.
He received his candidate's degree (somewhere between American master's and doctoral degrees) from the Ioffe Institute (formerly the Physico-Technical Institute) in 1961. At this point, he became involved with heterostructures and semiconductor lasers. Because early transistors were relatively low-powered and slow, semiconductor transistors based on heterostructures were proposed as a way of increasing amplification and achieving higher frequencies and power. Such a heterostructure consists of two semiconductors whose atomic structures fit one another well, but that have different electronic properties. Kroemer had formulated these ideas theoretically in a 1957 paper. Alferov understood that semiconductor physics would be developing on the basis of hetero- rather than homostructures and led his group at the Ioffe Institute in the race to develop this technology before Bell Telephone, IBM, and RCA could do so.
During this period of intense research, he rose steadily in rank at the Ioffe Institute, becoming a senior researcher in 1964 and head of his laboratory in 1967. That year he married Tamara Darskaya, a researcher at a large space enterprise, with whom he would have two children. By 1969 his group had mastered all the ideas on control of the electron and light fluxes in classical heterostructures based on the arsenid gallium–arsenid aluminum heterostructure.
During his first trip to the United States in 1969, Alferov spoke about his group's recent development of low-threshold room temperature lasers. He electrified his audience when he explained how they had obtained the continuous wave regime by developing an optical fiber with low losses—a breakthrough that resulted in the discovery and rapid development of optical fiber communication. He was able to visit Bell Labs and IBM and later wrote of his relationship with the giant American firms as "a rare example of open and friendly competition between laboratories belonging to the antagonistic great powers."
Semiconductor heterostructures have been important to the development of lasers, light-emitting diodes, modulators, and solar panels. The semiconductor laser is based on the recombination of electrons and holes, emitting photons (particles of light). If the density of these photons becomes sufficiently high, they may begin to move in rhythm with each other and form a phase-coherent state, that is, laser light. The first semiconductor lasers had low efficiency and could only shine in short pulses. Both Kroemer and Alferov had suggested in 1963 that the concentration of electrons, holes, and photons would become much higher if they were confined to a thin semiconductor layer between two others—a double heterojunction. Despite a lack of the most advanced equipment, in May 1970, a few weeks earlier than their American competitors, Alferov's group succeeded in producing a laser that operated continuously and that did not require troublesome cooling.
After receiving his doctorate from the Ioffe Institute in 1970, Alferov spent six months in 1971 in the United States, working in the semiconductor devices lab at the University of Illinois. In 1973, he became professor of optoelectronics at the Saint Petersburg State Electrotechnical Institute (the new name of the Ulyanov Institute). In 1987 he was elected director of the Ioffe Institute and in 1988 was appointed dean of the faculty of physics and technology at Saint Petersburg Technical University. He was elected a corresponding member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Academy of Sciences in 1972 and a full member in 1979. Since 1989 he has been vice