Communist physicist whose semiconductor heterostructures opened the IT era
Demonstrating Russia's social stratification in the 2000s, he held up a wine glass and said: 'The contents of this glass belong — alas! — to just ten percent of the population. And the stem that holds the glass is the rest of the population.'
Zhores Alferov was a Soviet applied physicist who pioneered semiconductor heterostructure physics and built the first continuous-wave room-temperature semiconductor laser in 1968, laying the physical foundation for fiber-optic communication, CDs, and barcode readers. For this work he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000. As director of the Ioffe Institute from 1987, chairman of the St. Petersburg Scientific Center from 1989, and vice-president of the USSR and Russian Academy of Sciences, he preserved Russia's basic science through the collapse of the Soviet Union. He served in the State Duma from 1995 on the Communist Party list, defending science funding and fiercely opposing the 2013 Academy reforms. Named after Jean Jaurès, he remained a communist all his life while leading one side of the Cold War's optoelectronics race.
Career Timeline
- 1953–1961Researcher at Ioffe Institute; contributed to first Soviet transistors
- 1963Filed patent for double-heterostructure semiconductor laser
- 1970Doctor of Sciences in Physics and Mathematics (Ioffe Institute)
- 1972Corresponding Member, USSR Academy of Sciences; Lenin Prize
- 1979Full Member (Academician), USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1987–2003Director, Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute
- 1989–2017Vice-President, USSR/Russian Academy of Sciences; Chairman, St. Petersburg Scientific Center
- 1995–2019Deputy, State Duma of the Russian Federation (CPRF federal list)
- 2000Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Herbert Kroemer)