Herbert Kroemer

Herbert Kroemer (born August 25, 1928), a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1952 from the University of Göttingen, Germany, with a dissertation on hot electron effects in the then-new transistor, setting the stage for a career in research on the physics of semiconductor devices. In 2000, Dr. Kroemer, along with Zhores I. Alferov, was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics". The other co-recipient of the Nobel Prize was Jack Kilby for his invention and development of integrated cicuits and micro-chips.

He had an early success in a rather different subject, when together with Burgess and Houston in 1953, he detected a mathematical error in Nordheim's theory of electron tunnelling through the image-force rounded barrier used in the theory of field electron emission. Between them, they generated tables of correction-factor values that are still in use over 50 years later.

He worked in a number of research laboratories in Germany and the United States and taught electrical engineering at the University of Colorado from 1968 to 1976. He joined the UCSB faculty in 1976, focusing its semiconductor research program on the emerging compound semiconductor technology rather than on mainstream silicon technology.

Professor Kroemer was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. Professor Kroemer has always preferred to work on problems that are ahead of mainstream technology. In the 1950s, he invented the drift transistor and was the first to point out that advantages could be gained in various semiconductor devices by incorporating heterojunctions into the devices. Most notably, in 1963 he proposed the concept of the double-heterostructure laser, the central concept in the field of semiconductor lasers. Kroemer became an early pioneer in molecular beam epitaxy, concentrating on applying the technology to untried new materials.

Along with Charles Kittel he co-authored the popular textbook Thermal Physics, first published in 1980, and still used today. He is also the celebrated authors of another textbook in Quantum Mechanics for Engineers and Materials Scientists. Professor Kroemer is an excellent teacher and can present complicated Nobel Prize level concepts with simplicity.

External links

• Not Just Blue Sky
• Nobelprize.org page
• Personal Homepage USCB
• Freeview video Interview with Herbert Kroemer by the Vega Science Trust
• U.S. Patent 5067828 Transferred electron effective mass modulator (Herbert Kroemer)
• U.S. Patent 5013683 Method for growing tilted superlattices (Herbert Kroemer)
• Herb’s Bipolar Transistors IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRON DEVICES, VOL. 48, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2001 PDF
• Influence of Mobility and Lifetime Variations on Drift-Field Effects in Silicon-Junction Devices PDF
• Heterostructure Bipolar Transistors and Integrated Circuits PDF