Nobel Lecture: The double heterostructure concept and its applications in physics, electronics, and technology

It is impossible to imagine now modern solid-state physics without semiconductor heterostructures. Semiconductor heterostructures and, particularly, double heterostructures, including quantum wells, wires, and dots, are today the subject of research of two-thirds of the semiconductor physics community. The ability to control the type of conductivity of a semiconductor material by doping with various impurities and the idea of injecting nonequilibrium charge carriers could be said to be the seeds from which semiconductor electronics developed. Heterostructures developed from these beginnings, making it possible to solve the considerably more general problem of controlling the fundamental parameters inside the semiconductor crystals and devices: band gaps, effective masses of the charge carriers and the mobilities, refractive indices, electron energy spectrum, etc. Development of the physics and technology of semiconductor heterostructures has resulted in remarkable changes in our everyday life. Heterostructure electronics are widely used in many areas of human civilization. It is hardly possible to imagine our recent life without double heterostructure (DHS) laser-based telecommunication systems, heterostructure-based light-emitting diodes (LED’s), heterostructure bipolar transistors, or lownoise high-electron-mobility transistors for highfrequency applications including, for example, satellite television. Double-heterostructure lasers now enter practically every house with CD players. Heterostructure solar cells have been widely used for space and terrestrial applications. Our interest in semiconductor heterostructures was not occasional. Systematic studies of semiconductors were started in the early 1930s at the Physico-Technical Institute under the direct leadership of its founder, Abraham Ioffe. V. P. Zhuze and B. V. Kurchatov studied the intrinsic and impurity conductivity of semiconductors in 1932, and the same year Ioffe and Ya. I. Frenkel created a theory of rectification in a metalsemiconductor contact based on the tunneling phenom-

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