Benjamin Lax

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Benjamin Lax (born December 29, 1915 in Miskolc , Austria-Hungary , † April 21, 2015 ) was an Austro-American experimental solid-state physicist.

Life

Lax received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Cooper Union in New York in 1941, served in the US Army during World War II, making it from the US Army Signal Corps to the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he worked on radar development. From 1951 he was a scientist at the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT, where he initially headed the ferrite group, from 1955 to 1957 and from 1958 the solid state group and from 1964 to 1965 was deputy head of the Lincoln Laboratory. 1960 to 1981 he was also head of the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory. From 1965 he was a professor at MIT. In 1986 he retired.

In the 1950s, he examined, among other things, the band structure with cyclotron resonance . Lax theoretical work was important in the work carried out under his direction on the semiconductor laser at the Lincoln Lab in 1962 - there was one of the teams (Robert Rediker) developing one, others were at General Electric and IBM, with Robert N. Hall General Electric was just the first to demonstrate one. In his own words, he started the semiconductor laser project at the Lincoln Lab, which pioneered it, even if they were narrowly beaten in the end by IBM and General Electric,

In 1960 he received the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize . In 1962 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , since 1969 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  2. ↑ Lax Experimental investigation of the electronic band structure of solids , Rev.Mod.Phys., Vol 30, 1958, pp 122-154
  3. ↑ Oral History Interview with Frederik Nebeker 1991, IEEE History Center, Online
personal data
SURNAME Lax, Benjamin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austro-American experimental solid-state physicist
DATE OF BIRTH December 29, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Miskolc , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 2015