Zhores Alferov
Nobel Prize-winning physicist nostalgic for the Soviet Union
ZHORES ALFEROV, who has died aged 88, became the first Russian scientist to be honoured by the Nobel jury since the collapse of Communism when he won a share of the 2000 Prize in Physics with two American scientists, Herbert Kroemer and Jack Kilby, for research which paved the way for everything from satellites to computers, CD players, mobile telephones, fibre optics and solar panels.
Alferov, who was director of Saint Petersburg’s AF Ioffe Physico-technical Institute, and, from 1995, a deputy in the lower house of the Russian parliament, accepted the award as a belated tribute to Soviet science. He used the publicity to to call for better funding of Russian research.
He was honoured for work carried out in the early 1960s on devices called heterostructure semiconductors which, with integrated circuits (microchips), laid the scientific foundations for the communications revolution.
When he began his research, semiconductors (devices which enable the rapid switching of electric currents on and off) were, like the transistors made from them, usually fabricated from a single substance such as silicon. The heterostructure semiconductors which Alferov pioneered were made from layers of two or more different kinds of semiconductors and proved much more efficient, with higher switching speeds and other advantageous properties.
They proved vital to the development of the laser technology which underpins modern satellite and ground-based communications, including the room temperature laser, which Alferov developed, the key component in transmitting information over the network of fibre-optics cables that underpin the internet.
“I am from Russia – from the Soviet Union, in fact, as the work which won this Nobel Prize was done in the Soviet time,” Alferov declared proudly. “We staged the first experiments – fibre-optic lines, solar panels, compact discs.”
Zhores Ivanovich Alferov was born in Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, on March 15 1930. His father, a factory manager, was a Bolshevik who had led a cavalry unit in the Russian Civil War and had met Lenin and Trotsky. The name Zhores was a Russian rendition of the surname of Jean Jaurès, the French socialist assassinated in 1914. An older brother, Marx Alferov, would be killed while serving in the Red Army during the Second World War.
Alferov developed an interest in physics at school in Minsk and went on to study at the Electrotechnical University and the Ioffe Physical-technical Institute in what was then Leningrad. He remained at the Institute after graduation, becoming its director in 1987.
Alferov was first elected to the Russian State Duma in 1995 for the pro-yeltsin Our Home is Russia party, but in 1999 was re-elected on the Communist Party list. He was re-elected again in 2003 and 2007.
He used the publicity from his Nobel Prize to draw attention to cuts in government spending on science from seven per cent in Soviet times to less than two per cent in 2000, demanding to know why Russia’s finance ministry – “which merely consists of bureaucrats” – got one and a half times more money than the whole science sector. He pledged to use a large proportion of his prize to fund research, adding: “My wife will help me with how to spend the other part.”
A lifelong atheist, in 2007 Alferov was a signatory to an open letter to Vladimir Putin warning that the Orthodox church’s growing influence in Russia, and in schools in particular, threatened to erode the separation of church and state. “The church would like to have more believers,’’ he said. “But they can have their religious schools and their Sunday schools. In normal government schools, absolutely not.’’
Alferov and his wife Tamara had two children.