Robert N. Hall
Robert Noel Hall (born December 25, 1919 in New Haven , Connecticut , † November 7, 2016 in Schenectady , New York ) was an American physicist who demonstrated the first laser diode in 1962 .
Hall studied at Caltech (Bachelor 1942), then worked in the research laboratories of General Electric on radar development (radar with continuous frequencies to disrupt enemy radar) and returned after his doctorate (where he built a proton source for nuclear physics under William Alfred Fowler ), for which he returned to Caltech in 1946 and which took place in 1948, returned there. For the remainder of his career he stayed in General Electric's research laboratory in Schenectady. In the 1950s he worked on transistor development and semiconductors. He developed cleaning processes for germanium and the alloying method for the production of PIN diodes and alloy junction transistors (early bipolar transistors ) based on germanium (for silicon, the work at General Electric was carried out by Nick Holonyak). He also invented the rate growing method for making transistors.
His work on PIN diodes also resulted in the Shockley-Read-Hall process for charge carrier recombination being named after himself and William Shockley , WT Read.
When, after the invention of the laser in 1960, the question arose whether light-emitting diodes could also be used as lasers, several laboratories competed (including IBM , MIT , the Joffe Institute in the Soviet Union), from which Hall's team emerged narrowly as the winner.
In addition to the laser diode, a version of the magnetron emerged from his development work during World War II , which is used in most microwave ovens today, and from his pioneering work with PIN diodes, the basic idea of today's semiconductor power rectifiers ( thyristors ).
In the 1960s he devoted himself to the production of very pure germanium for particle detectors. The reason was that around 1960 a nuclear physicist friend of mine complained that the industry was no longer producing suitable detectors. General Electric soon dropped out of production.
In the 1970s he worked on photovoltaics and solar cells . In 1987 he retired from General Electric as the holder of 43 patents. In his retirement, he turned to community service such as setting up demonstration experiments for physics students at Schenectady, repairing tape recorders for the Library of Congress's audio book program, and teaching the learning disabled.
In 1962 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering since 1977 and of the National Academy of Sciences since 1978 . In 1994 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Web links
- Biography at Inventor Hall of Fame ( Memento from December 5, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- Hall on the early history of the transistor
- Inventor of the Week, MIT
Individual evidence
- ↑ legacy.com , accessed March 25, 2017
- ^ RN Hall, GE Fenner, JD Kingsley, TJ Soltys, RO Carlson: Coherent Light Emission From GaAs Junctions . In: Physical Review Letters . tape 9 , no. 9 November 1962, p. 366-368 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.9.366 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hall, Robert N |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Hall, Robert Noel |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 25, 1919 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New Haven , Connecticut |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 7, 2016 |
| Place of death | Schenectady , New York |