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Alumnus, George E. Smith, M.S. '56, Ph.D. '59, to be awarded Nobel Prize
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| Image from the National Inventor's Hall of Fame Foundation (taken from http://www.nobel.se) |
On December 10th, alumnus, George E. Smith, Ph.D. '59 will be awarded one quarter of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit--the CCD sensor." This technology, which translates light into electronic signals, enables digital photography, digital microscopy, and many other electronic imaging and processing applications used by JFI researchers today.
As a graduate student in the Institute for Metals (which was renamed the James Franck Institute in 1967), Smith was sponsored by A.W. Lawson and performed research in the Low Temperature Laboratory. For his Ph.D. dissertation, Smith conducted high-frequency surface resistance measurements on plane surfaces of single crystal bismuth at 2°K as a function of orientation, allowing information about the Fermi surface to be inferred.
While at the University of Chicago, Smith was supported through fellowships from Bell Telephone Laboratory and the National Science Foundation. After graduation, Smith launched his scientific career at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ where he and co-Nobel laureate, Willard S. Boyle, invented the CCD (charge-coupled device) sensor in 1969.
For more information, see:
- http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/index.html
- http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1723