Жорес Алферов: Нобель сыйлықты физик және жартылай өткізгіш гетероқұрылымдардың пионері

Soviet Russian physicist (1930–2019)

Zhores Ivanovich Alferov (; ; 15 March 19301 March 2019) was a Soviet and Russian physicist and academic who contributed significantly to the creation of modern heterostructure physics and electronics. He shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of the semiconductor heterojunction for optoelectronics. He also became a politician in his later life, serving in the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, as a member of the Communist Party from 1995.

Alferov was born in Vitebsk, Byelorussian SSR, Soviet Union, to a Russian father, Ivan Karpovich Alferov, a factory manager, and a Jewish mother, Anna Vladimirovna Rosenblum. He was named after French socialist Jean Jaurès while his older brother was named Marx after Karl Marx. Alferov then served as the director of the Ioffe Institute from 1987 These planar semiconductor amplifiers would be referred to as transistors in the present day. Alferov's contribution included work on germanium diodes for use as a rectifier. In the early 1960s, Alferov organized an effort at Ioffe Institute to develop semiconductor heterostructures. Semiconductor heterojunctions transistors enabled higher frequency use than their homojunction predecessors, and this capability plays a key role in modern mobile phone and satellite communications. Alferov and colleagues worked on GaAs and AlAs III V heterojunctions. A particular focus was the use of heterojunctions to create semiconductor lasers capable of lasing at room temperature. In 1963, Alferov filed a patent application proposing double heterostructure lasers; Herbert Kroemer independently filed a US patent several months later. In 1966, Alferov's lab created the first lasers based on heterostructures, although they did not lase continuously. Then in 1968, Alferov and coworkers produced the first continuous wave semiconductor heterojunction laser operating at room temperature. It was for this work that Alferov received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Herbert Kroemer, "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high speed and optoelectronics". In the 1960s and 1970s Alferov continued his work on the physics and technology of semiconductor heterostructures in his lab at the Ioffe Institute. Alferov's investigations of injection properties of semiconductors and his contributions to the development of lasers, solar cells, LEDs, and epitaxy processes, led to the creation of modern heterojunction physics and electronics. Alferov had an almost messianic conception of heterostructures, writing: "Many scientists have contributed to this remarkable progress, which not only determines in large measure the future prospects of solid state physics but in a certain sense affects the future of human society as well."

In 1987, Alferov became the fifth director of the Ioffe Institute. In 1989, Alferov gained the administrative position of chairman of the Leningrad Scientific Center, now referred to as the St. Petersburg Scientific Center. In the Leningrad region, this scientific center is an overarching organization comprising 70 institutions, organizations, enterprises, and scientific societies.

Alferov served on the advisory council of CRDF Global.

Since November 2018, Alferov suffered from hypertensive emergency. He died at the age of 88 on 1 March 2019.

Alferov's wife was named Tamara Darskaya. Together they had two children, a son Ivan and a daughter Olga. He was one of the signers of the open letter to President Vladimir Putin from members of the Russian Academy of Sciences against clericalisation of Russia.