Zhores Ivanovich Alferov
1930–2019, Vitebsk, Belarus (Soviet Union), Saint Petersburg, Russia
Russian semiconductor physicist who pioneered semiconductor heterostructures — the foundation of diode lasers, LEDs, and modern optoelectronics.
Alferov graduated from the V. I. Ulyanov Electrotechnical Institute in Leningrad in 1952 and joined the Ioffe Institute, where he spent his entire career and served as director from 1987 to 2003. He was a member of the Soviet/Russian Academy of Sciences and later a deputy of the State Duma.
From the early 1960s his group studied heterostructures — junctions of different semiconductors — and in 1968–1970 built double-heterostructure GaAs/AlGaAs lasers operating continuously at room temperature, paving the way for CD lasers, fiber-optic communication, and mobile phones. He received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Nobel-winning work
Alferov and his team at the Ioffe Institute developed the idea of using heterostructures — boundaries between semiconductors with different band gaps — to confine electrons, holes, and light in the same ultra-thin region. His 'double heterostructure' GaAs/AlGaAs design enabled semiconductor lasers to emit continuously at room temperature (1970), previously considered impossible.
This principle underlies most of today's photonics: fiber-optic and CD/DVD lasers, high-brightness LEDs, heterostructure solar cells, and heterojunction bipolar transistors. The 2000 Nobel honored 'work on semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed electronics and optoelectronics' (shared with Kroemer; the other half went to Kilby).
Workplaces: Ioffe Institute
Russia