Early career From 1954 to 1957 Panish studied the
chemical thermodynamics of
molten salts at the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. In 1957, Panish began working for the Research and Advanced Development Division of
Avco Corporation in Massachusetts. The primary contract of this division was to develop vehicles for the reentry of
thermonuclear weapons into the atmosphere for the
United States Air Force. Panish was unwilling to do this work, and instead conducted basic research on chemical thermodynamics of refractory compounds. In 1964, Panish left Avco Corporation because the government terminated the funding for basic research. These early lasers could only run continuously at very low temperatures. At room temperature, they could only operate for a fraction of a second. For the lasers to have practical applications, they would need to operate continuously at room temperature. Panish and Izuo Hayashi independently developed the single heterostructure laser first and then the double heterostructure laser. In 1970,
Zhores Alferov published the announcement of the first room temperature continuously operating double heterostructure laser, one month before Hayashi and Panish published similar results. The two developments were obtained independently. Panish experimented with making wafers using a new form of liquid-phase
epitaxy while Hayashi tested the laser properties. Panish and Hayashi observed what they thought might be CW operation in several wafers in the weeks before their final demonstration. That had to await a laser that lived long enough for a complete plot of the lasing spectrum to be achieved. Over the
Memorial Day weekend in 1970, while Panish was at home, Hayashi tried a diode and it emitted a continuous-wave beam with just over 24 degrees Celsius and he was able to plot the complete spectrum with the very slow equipment available at the time. Room-temperature lasers were soon duplicated at
RCA Laboratories,
Standard Telecommunication Laboratories and Nippon Electric Corporation (
NEC). Over the next few years, the lasers became longer-lasting and more reliable. At Bell Labs, the job of creating a practical device was given to Barney DeLoach. But in January 1973, they told him to cease this work. As he recalled, their view was, "We've already got air, we've already got copper. Who needs a new medium?" The Japanese success was enhanced by Panish's ex-partner Izuo Hayashi, who had returned to Japan. After the work on double heterostructure lasers, Panish continued to demonstrate variants of laser structures with other collaborators through the late 1970s, but the major focus of his work for the remainder of his career was to exploit the new opportunities presented by the use of Molecular Beam Epitaxy to produce lattice matched semiconductor heterostructures in III-V systems other than GaAs-AlGaAs for other devices (detectors, quantum well physics and devices, ultra fast hererostructure transistors) and for the study of the physics of small layered structures. He worked on this issue until 1992. ==Awards and honors==