| J. E. Lilienfeld | |
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.jpg) Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (1881-1963)
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| Born | April 18, 1882 Lemberg, Galicia, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | August 28, 1963 (aged 81) Charlotte Amalie, Virgin Islands, USA |
| Residence | USA |
| Citizenship | Austro-Hungarian (pre-1934) American (post-1934) |
| Ethnicity | Jewish-Austrian |
| Fields | Physicist and electronic engineer |
| Institutions | University of Leipzig Amrad, Inc Ergon Research Laboratories |
| Alma mater | Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität |
| Doctoral advisor | Max Planck Emil Warburg |
| Other academic advisors | Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff |
| Known for | MOSFET Electrolytic capacitor |
| Religious stance | Judaism |
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (April 18, 1882 – August 28, 1963) was an Austro-Hungarian physicist. He was born in Lemberg in Austria-Hungary (now called Lviv in Ukraine).
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Education
Ph.D. Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (renamed in 1949), Berlin, on February 18, 1905. From 1900 to 1904 he studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. In 1905 he started to work at the physics institute at the University of Leipzig. Lilienfeld attained the habilitation in 1910.
Career
Lilienfeld's early career was at the University of Leipzig, where he conducted important early work on electrical discharges in "vacuum", between metal electrodes, from about 1910 onwards. His early passion was to clarify how the phenomena changed as vacuum preparation techniques improved. More than any other scientist, he was responsible for the identification of (presently named) field electron emission as a separate physical effect. (He called it "auto-electronic emission", and was interested in it as a possible electron source for miniaturised X-ray tubes, in medical applications.) Lilienfeld was responsible for the first reliable account in English of the experimental phenomenology of field electron emission, in 1922. The effect itself was explained by Fowler and Nordheim, in 1928.
Lilienfeld moved to the United States in the early 1920s, originally in order to defend patents he possessed, and then made a scientific/industrial career there.
Among other things, he invented the MOSFET (in 1925) and the electrolytic capacitor in the 1920s. He filed several patents describing the construction and operation of transistors as well as many features of modern transistors. When Brattain, Bardeen and Shockley tried to get a patent on their device, most of their claims were rejected due to the Lilienfeld patents.[citation needed]
The optical radiation emitted when electrons are hitting a metal surface is named "Lilienfeld radiation" after he first discovered it close to X-ray tube anodes. Its origin is attributed to the excitation of plasmons in the metal surface.[1][2][3]
The American Physical Society has named one of its major prizes after Lilienfeld.
Personal life
Lilienfeld emigrated to the USA in 1927 and became a U.S. citizen in 1934. He took an American wife, Beatrice Ginsburg. They were married in New York City on May 2, 1926, and lived in Winchester, Mass., for some time, when Lilienfeld was director of the Ergon Research Laboratories in Malden, Mass. In 1935 he and his wife built a house in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the hope of escaping an allergy associated with wheat fields from which Lilienfeld had suffered for most of his life. Lilienfeld frequently traveled between St. Thomas and various mainland locations and continued to test new ideas and patent the resulting products.
Lilienfeld's patents
- US patent 1745175 "Method and apparatus for controlling electric current" first filed in Canada on 22.10.1925, describing a device similar to a MESFET
- US patent 1900018 "Device for controlling electric current" filed on 28.03.1928, a thin film MOSFET
- US patent 1877140 "Amplifier for electric currents" filed on 08.12.1928, solid state device where the current flow is controlled by a porous metal layer, a solid state version of the vacuum tube
- US patent 2013564 "Electrolytic condenser" filed on 29.08.1931, Electrolytic capacitor
References
- ^ J.E. Lilienfeld: Die sichtbare Strahlung des Brennecks von Röntgenröhren. Physikalische Zeitschrift, 20(12) 280, 1919
- ^ Boersch, Hans; Radeloff, C.; Sauerbrey, G. (August 1961). "Über die an Metallen durch Elektronen ausgelöste sichtbare und ultraviolette Strahlung" (in German). Zeitschrift für Physik A Hadrons and Nuclei 165 (4): 464–484. doi:. http://www.springerlink.com/content/m614528152n64251/.
- ^ Boersch, Hans; Radeloff, C.; Sauerbrey, G. (July 15, 1961). "Experimental detection of transition radiation". Phys. Rev. Lett. (American Physical Society) 7 (2): 52–54. doi:. http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v7/p52.
External links
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