The Long-Reaching Influence of Arthur von Hippel: Interdisciplinarity and Semiconductors
- PDF / 108,350 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 612 x 792 pts (letter) Page_size
- 89 Downloads / 154 Views
The Long-Reaching Influence of Arthur von Hippel: Interdisciplinarity and Semiconductors Alan B. Fowler Abstract While Arthur von Hippel did not work directly in semiconductors, his interdisciplinary style introduced a way of doing science in universities that was applied to semiconductors and now is applicable to nanotechnology as well as many other technologically important areas. This article covers the major developments and players in semiconductors from their early discovery and understanding, in the context of von Hippel’s seminal development of the interdisciplinary approach to research and its impact on the field. Keywords: Arthur von Hippel, semiconductors.
While the connection between Arthur von Hippel and the field of semiconductors is at best tenuous, what does seem to be true is that he provided an early model for interdisciplinary research that has proved relevant for technologies far beyond his own scientific endeavors. Such mixtures of training in laboratories is essential if universities are to partake in the most exciting new science and technology, and if students are to be trained for the complex technological world of the present and the probably even more complex world of the future. Even though von Hippel did not contribute directly to the field of semiconductors, that field still owes him a debt of gratitude for his foresight in seeing the need for academic laboratories that combine the skills of different disciplines. Arthur von Hippel’s seminal development of the interdisciplinary approach has had a lasting impact on the very prac-
854
tice of scientific research itself. This article will demonstrate that impact by examining the major developments and players in the field of semiconductors from its early discovery and understanding. There was a reason that Arthur von Hippel was not in semiconductors. He came from a German tradition that at the time largely regarded semiconductors as intractable to scientific inquiry. Witness the famous comment of Wolfgang Pauli in 1931: “One shouldn’t work on semiconductors, that is a filthy mess; who knows whether they really exist?”1 The heaviest emphasis was on defects in solids, led by Robert W. Pohl. It was in this atmosphere that von Hippel began his work and made his early contributions. The use of the word “semiconductor” dates back at least to 1826 in a book by Ivan A. Dvigubsky, in which he mentions that Cavendish had observed that water conducts, but much less than metals.
There were contributions by Michael Faraday (decrease in conductivity with decreasing temperature, 1833), Ferdinand Braun (the cat’s whisker diode, 1874– 1877), A. Schuster (rectification of coppercopper oxide, 1874), Willoughby Smith (photoconductivity in selenium, 1873), and Edwin H. Hall (the Hall effect, 1878). It took roughly 50 years before practical rectifiers were developed. By 1900, “semiconductor,” or halbleiter, was in common usage as a term to describe materials with intermediate conductivities. By 1922, Grüneisen had defined semiconductors by the property of
Data Loading...
