Shores i alferov autobiography of mark

The Russian physicist Zhores Alferov, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physics with the US scientists Herbert Kroemer and Jack Kilby, died on 1 March aged 88. Alferov pioneered the creation of semiconductor lasers, which led to a vast number of applications that are now ubiquitous in modern life such as DVD players and mobile phones.

Alferov was born on 15 March 1930 in Belarus, which was then part of the Soviet Union.

After graduating from the Electrotechnical Institute in Leningrad in 1952, Alferov moved to the Ioffe Institute in St Petersburg, where he spent the remainder of his career. In 1970 he was awarded a doctorate in physics and mathematics from the institute and became its director in 1987 — a position he held until 2003.

An optics revolution

It was at the Ioffe Institute where Alferov carried out his Nobel-prize-winning research.

In the early 1960s, Alferov began working on semiconductor heterostructures – devices that contain thin l