Charles H. Henry

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Charles H. Henry (born May 6, 1937 in Chicago , Illinois ; † September 16, 2016 ) was an American physicist who dealt with semiconductor lasers , semiconductor physics, integrated optics and their applications. He is considered to be the inventor of the quantum well laser.

Life

Henry graduated from the University of Chicago with a Masters degree in 1959 and received his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1965 . Immediately afterwards, he went to Bell Laboratories in the semiconductor research department, which he headed from 1970 to 1975. In 1997 he retired there. He became a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs.

He had been married since 1958 and had three children.

plant

He had the idea for quantum wells in 1972 (the name was coined by Nick Holonyak and his group in the late 1970s ) when he realized that sandwich-like heterostructures of semiconductors could act like waveguides for electrons and lead to discrete electron states. They found experimental confirmation in 1973 after Henry suggested the physicist Raymond Dingle to look for it. In 1976 Dingle and Henry received a patent on it. Soon afterwards he realized how this could improve the properties of semiconductor lasers, for example the wavelength of the laser could be changed simply by changing the layer thickness of the heterostructure and not just by changing the material composition, as was previously the case.

In 1968 he discovered with employees the source of the red color in gallium phosphide - LEDs .

He made important contributions to the understanding of the noise of semiconductor lasers when, in 1982, based on ideas from Melvin Lax , he showed why the line width of semiconductor lasers is fifty times larger than that predicted according to the theory of Schawlow and Townes . The alpha parameter (originally by Lax) then became an important parameter for semiconductor lasers. In the 1990s he turned to noise in photonics .

In the 1980s he and Rudolf Kazarinov developed a new technology in integrated optics (Silicon Optical Bench Waveguide Technology), which is used for wavelength division multiplexing , for example .

Honors and memberships

In 1999 he received the Charles Hard Townes Award . In 2001 he received the Prize for Industrial Applications of Physics from the American Institute of Physics . In 1999 he received the Jack A. Morton Award from the IEEE.

He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an IEEE Fellow .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ legacy.com
  3. ↑ Henry describes the discovery in the foreword to Peter S. Zory (editor) The Origin of Quantum Wells and the Quantum Well Laser , Academic Press 1993
  4. ^ R. Dingle, W. Wiegmann, CH Henry, "Quantum States of Confined Carriers in Very Thin AlxGa (1-x) As-GaAs-AlxGa (1-x) As Heterostructures," Phys. Rev. Lett. 33, 827 (1974)
  5. ↑ Quantum Effects in Heterostructure Lasers , US Patent No. 3,982,207, filed March 7, 1975, issued September 21, 1976
  6. ^ CH Henry, PJ Dean, JD Cuthbert New Red Pair Luminescence From GaP , Physical Review, Volume 166, 1968, p. 754
  7. ^ Henry, Kazarinov Quantum Noise in Photonics , Reviews of Modern Physics, Volume 68, 1996, pp. 801-853
  8. ^ Prize of the AIP for Henry
personal data
SURNAME Henry, Charles H.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 6, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago , Illinois
DATE OF DEATH 16th September 2016