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Memorial Tributes Volume 22 (2019) / Chapter Skim
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ROBERT N. HALL
Pages 133-140

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From page 134...
... MAHAN SUBMITTED BY THE NAE HOME SECRETARY ROBERT NOEL HALL, a pioneer in the early days of semiconductor physics, spent almost his entire career at the research and development laboratory of the General Electric Co. in Schenectady, New York.
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From page 135...
... The Bell Laboratory team of John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invented the germanium transistor, but when a far-sighted GE manager named Leroy Apker suggested that silicon would be a better semiconductor, Bob began working on silicon devices. The short-term result was that GE became the leading manufacturing company in those early days, when transistor devices were placed on pegboard circuits.
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From page 136...
... Later work by GE theorists showed that the zero-bias anomaly in GaAs was caused by atom vibrations called phonons. In 1962 Bob's GE team of Gunther Fenner, Jack Kingsley, Ted Soltys, and Bob Carlson was vying with counterparts at other companies' laboratories to develop a semiconductor laser, which ultimately became by far the most useful laser ever invented.
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From page 137...
... And after Bob encouraged me to team up with a newly hired experimentalist, Jim Conley, to investigate electron tunneling in a newly discovered phenomenon -- the Schottky barrier between a metal and a semiconductor -- the collaboration with Jim proved very fruitful and established my career in solid state physics. Bob spent the early years of his own career learning how to add impurities to semiconductors.
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From page 138...
... He was a fellow of the American Physical Society and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences as well as the NAE. He received the Marconi International Fellowship, and was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame.
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From page 139...
... Lean, wiry, and very fit, he was an active outdoorsman. In summer he hiked, swam, and sailed at his family vacation house on Hunt Lake, NY; during the winter months he loved to ice skate.
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Key Terms

  • injection laser
  • semiconductor injection
  • electron tunneling
  • review letters
  • physical review

  • laboratory team
  • bell laboratory
  • adding impurities
  • energy gap
  • cell phones

  • bob spent
  • bob learned
  • bob agreed
  • semiconductor laboratory
  • bob politely

  • bob carlson
  • met bob
  • bob quickly
  • semiconductor laser
  • leading semiconductor

  • bob attended
  • bob accepted
  • bob encouraged
  • noel hall
  • earliest projects

  • jim conley
  • enemy radar
  • john bardeen
  • jerry tiemann
  • state physics


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