Zhores Alferov

Origins and early life

Zhores Alferov was born in Vitebsk, in the Byelorussian Soviet Republic, on 15 March 1930, to Ivan Karpovich Alferov and Anna Vladimirovna Rosenblum, his Jewish mother. He graduated in electronics from the Ulyanov Electrotechnical Institute in Leningrad in 1952 and joined the Ioffe Institute the following year; he stayed there his whole career and became its director in 1987.

Work and career

In the early 1960s he set a group to work on semiconductor heterostructures — crystals grown from layers of different materials, so that electrons can be penned into a thin sheet instead of wandering through the bulk. That confinement is what makes a semiconductor laser work at room temperature and what makes a transistor fast enough for a mobile telephone. The laser diodes in fibre-optic cables, in compact-disc players and in barcode readers, and the bright light-emitting diodes that now light rooms, all descend from the layered crystals he and his group learned to grow.

He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for that work in optoelectronics. He sat in the State Duma from 1999 and died in Saint Petersburg on 1 March 2019.