Herbert Kroemer

Herbert Kroemer was born on August 25, 1928, in Weimar, Germany. His father was a civil servant, while his mother was a housewife; neither of them had a high school education. Kroemer excelled in physics at school, letting him advance faster than his peers in the subject. Kroemer received his in 1951 and his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics the following year, both from the University of Göttingen. His doctoral thesis was on hot electron effects in the then-new transistor. == Career and research ==

Kroemer worked in a number of research laboratories in Germany and the United States, and taught electrical engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1968 to 1976. He joined the UCSB faculty in 1976, focusing its semiconductor research program on the emerging compound semiconductor technology rather than on mainstream silicon technology. Charles Kittel had published the successful Thermal Physics in 1969, and enlisted Kroemer to edit it for a second edition, which appeared in 1980. He is also the author of the textbook Quantum Mechanics for Engineering, Materials Science and Applied Physics. Kroemer always preferred to work on problems that are ahead of mainstream technology, inventing the drift transistor in the 1950s and being the first to point out that advantages could be gained in various semiconductor devices by incorporating heterojunctions. Most notably, though, in 1963 he proposed the concept of the double-heterostructure laser, which is now a central concept in the field of semiconductor lasers. Kroemer became an early pioneer in molecular beam epitaxy, concentrating on applying the technology to untried new materials. == Personal life ==

Kroemer was an atheist. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2003. He died on March 8, 2024, in Santa Barbara, California, at the age of 95. == Recognition ==

Memberships Awards == See also ==