Philip Anderson American physicist Philip Anderson won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1977. Anderson helped develop theories of magnetism and conduction in solid-state physics.
Philip W. Anderson, born in 1923, American physicist and Nobel laureate who helped develop basic theories of magnetism and conduction in solid-state physics. Anderson shared the 1977 Nobel Prize for physics with British physicist Sir Nevill Francis Mott and American physicist John Hasbrouck Van Vleck.
Anderson was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. He earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, where he was a student of John Van Vleck. Anderson studied at Harvard University from 1939 to 1949, except for the years 1943 to 1945, when he interrupted his education to work as a radio engineer in the United States Navy during World War II.
After he earned his doctorate from Harvard, Anderson went to work at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Anderson worked for Bell Laboratories until his retirement in 1984, while serving terms as professor of physics at several universities, including the University of Tokyo and Princeton University. From 1967 to 1975 Anderson was a visiting professor of theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge in England, where he worked with Nevill Mott.
Anderson's work focused on solid-state physics, also known as condensed-matter physics. One of the major advances of solid-state physics was the discovery of semiconductors in the 1920s. A semiconductor is a material that conducts electricity at room temperature more readily than an insulator, but less easily than a metal. Use of semiconductors made possible the development of integrated circuits, the components that control many electronic devices such as computers. One of the most important semiconductors is the crystalline form of silicon. Anderson's work concentrated on solids with no crystalline structure, which are called amorphous materials.
Anderson's work with amorphous materials like amorphous silicon led him to demonstrate in 1958 that it is possible for an electron to get trapped in a small area. This phenomenon, known as “Anderson localization,” suggests that amorphous materials can be used in place of the crystalline semiconductors used today. Anderson's discoveries also led to the development of electronic switching and memory devices made from amorphous materials such as glass. The field of amorphous semiconductors has become an area of intense research since Anderson's work.



0 comments:

Post a Comment

Copyright 2010 Learn More About Physics
Lunax Free Premium Blogger™ template by Introblogger