Esaki, Leo

Esaki, Leo

 orig. Esaki Reiona

(born March 12, 1925, Osaka, Japan) Japanese physicist. In 1956 he became chief physicist of the Sony Corp., and in 1960 he was awarded an IBM fellowship for further research in the U.S., subsequently joining IBM's research laboratories in Yorktown, N.Y. He worked intensively on tunneling in semiconductors and constructed the tunnel diode, which found broad applications in computers and other devices. He shared a 1973 Nobel Prize with Ivar Giaever (b. 1929) and Brian Josephson.

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Esaki, Leo 

Born Mar. 12, 1925, in Osaka. Japanese physicist.

Esaki graduated from Tokyo University in 1947 and was a staff member of the Sony Corporation from 1956 to 1960. In 1960, Esaki emigrated to the United States, where he went to work for International Business Machines Corporation.

Esaki’s principal works deal with solid-state physics, particularly the tunnel effect in semiconductors. In 1957 he invented the tunnel diode, for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1973. Esaki was the first to produce a superlattice.

WORKS

“A New Phenomenon in Narrow Germanium p-n Junctions.” Physical Review, 1958, vol. 109, no. 2.
“Long Journey Into Tunnelling.” Reviews of Modern Physics, 1974, vol. 46, no. 2.