2 UC Santa Barbara Scientists Receive Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics
Two scientists at UC Santa Barbara were among six worldwide awarded Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics Tuesday for work that ushered in today’s Information Age.
Physics professor Alan Heeger won for devising the electrically conducting plastics that could revolutionize computing. And engineering professor Herbert Kroemer received his award for developing the laser technology used in CD players and other consumer goods.
The scientists--both sporting white beards and black-rimmed glasses--hugged as they celebrated their awards at a crowded university reception. They won separate awards for well-known work in two different fields, and neither was completely surprised by the award. But when Kroemer, 72, got the phone call at 2:30 a.m., he thought at first that his students were playing a trick on him. “It took me a few seconds to recognize what was going on,” he said.
Heeger, 64, said he didn’t receive the call until 6:15 a.m., when he and his wife hopped out of bed and started crying. “I don’t even remember what was said,” Heeger said. “But I knew it was the day. Everybody knows Oct. 10.”
In previous years, Nobel prizes have rewarded more esoteric fields of study such as quantum mechanics and subatomic interactions. But this year’s prizes recognize more practical applications of science and the role of discovery in creating the cheaper, faster and better computer technologies that fuel the information revolution.
“The Nobel Prize in physics for year 2000 recognizes information and communication technology as the major force in the transition from an industrial society to an information- and knowledge-based society,” the Nobel committee said.
3 Scientists Share Physics Prize
The physics prize this year was awarded to three scientists for laying “a stable foundation for modern information technology.” Half of the $915,000 prize went to Jack Kilby, 76, of Texas Instruments, for inventing the microchip--long described as the single most important invention of the Information Age.
The other half of the physics prize was shared by Russian Zhores I. Alfyorov and Kroemer for layered semiconductor and low-energy laser technology, now used widely in cell phones, satellites, fiber optics, CD players and grocery store bar code readers.
The $915,000 chemistry prize went to two Americans--Heeger and Alan G. MacDiarmid, 73, of the University of Pennsylvania--and Japanese scientist Hideki Shirakawa, 64, for the discovery that plastic can be made electrically conductive. Their work started an entirely new field of chemistry that may one day be used to produce flat-screen televisions, thin plastic computer screens that can be rolled up, illuminated wallpaper and molecular computers smaller than watches.
“The physics prizes are about the electronics of today and the chemistry prizes are about the electronics of the future,” said Per Ahlberg, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the group that awards the prizes.
It was 1958 when a 34-year-old Kilby at Texas Instruments started tinkering with computer circuits. By today’s standards, his first computer chip was crude: a few transistors stuck to the same piece of semiconductor crystal with no connecting wires. But the device sparked the information revolution by vastly decreasing the cost of computer components while increasing their power.
“It’s been the route to cheap electronics,” said Gordon Moore, chairman emeritus of Intel. “Without this, computers would still be a big thing behind a corporate wall.”
“It’s the invention of the 20th century,” added Marc Brodsky, a semiconductor physicist who directs the American Institute of Physics. “In all our lives, it’s all around us, in everything we do.”
The chip’s co-inventor was Robert Noyce, a co-founder of both Intel and Silicon Valley, who used a different method to develop microchips. Noyce died in 1990; Nobel prizes are not given posthumously.
Despite being credited with more than 60 inventions, including the co-invention of the pocket calculator, Kilby was surprised by news of the prize early Tuesday morning.
“I’m still somewhat in a state of shock . . . but I’m tremendously pleased to have it,” a bathrobe-clad Kilby told reporters on his Dallas doorstep after being awakened by reporters bearing the good news.
The other half of the award was shared by Kroemer and Alfyorov, 70, for developing new kinds of semiconductors, called heterostructures. Those are essentially sandwiches of thin semiconductor layers that can be tailored to produce unique electronic effects or emit light.
The extremely fast transistors are used in satellite dishes and the base stations for cellular phones. Laser diodes built with the same technology conduct the flow of information through the Internet’s fiber-optic network. These ubiquitous lasers are also found in CD players, bar code readers and laser pointers.
The German-born Kroemer is an electrical and computer engineering professor who has been on the UC Santa Barbara faculty since 1976. He worked for RCA in Princeton, N.J., and Varian in Palo Alto when he developed the ideas in the mid-’60s that led to the breakthrough.
While Kroemer worked out the theory, a team on the other side of the Iron Curtain led by Alfyorov independently developed the technology at Russia’s prestigious A.F. Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in St. Petersburg in the late 1960s. Tuesday, scientists there held an impromptu shampanskoye celebration to toast the win.
Although Mikhail Gorbachev won a Nobel peace prize in 1990, a Russian has not won a scientific Nobel prize since 1978, when Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa won for work done in 1938 on ultra-low-temperature physics. Alfyorov is the seventh winner in physics from Russia or the former Soviet Union.
In addition to his scientific work, Alfyorov is a Communist Party deputy in the lower house of the parliament, the Duma. He said he would use some of his $250,000 in prize winnings to support science in Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, science has been severely underfunded there, with many scientists forced to supply their own laboratories out of their meager wages.
“I hope the fact that the Nobel Prize has been awarded to me will contribute to increasing the financing of science in Russia,” Alfyorov said. “Tomorrow, I will again work in the State Duma toward adjusting our federal budget spending, for Russia’s future depends on science and technology, not banking or selling out raw materials.”
Making Plastic Behave Like Metal
The chemistry prize was shared by three researchers who made the fundamental discovery in 1977 that a modified form of plastic could conduct electricity. “Prior to 1977, the only uses for plastics were structural: Styrofoam cups, nylons, polyester for clothes,” said Arthur Epstein, a physicist and chemist at Ohio State University. Plastic was, “from a point of view of electrical properties, a dud.”
The scientists found a way, essentially, to convert plastics into metals so that electrons could move freely through them. Unlike metals, though, plastics are flexible and amenable to manipulation for particular tasks.
Although conducting plastics are already used to prevent photographic film from fogging and to etch semiconductors, their potential uses are even more exciting. Those include the possibility of tiny molecular computers, flat and miniature TVs and thin computer screens that could be rolled and carried like newspapers.
“I don’t think it’s over at all,” Heeger said of the burgeoning field. “I think it’s all just beginning.”
The discovery started as an accident in Shirakawa’s lab at Tsukuba University, northeast of Tokyo, when a student mixed 1,000 times too much of a chemical into an experiment. Instead of producing a black powdery polymer called polyacetylene, the lab produced a silvery film.
MacDiarmid, Heeger and Shirakawa then collaborated on working with the film and oxidizing it in various ways until they came up with a polymer that was extremely conductive.
At the time of the discovery, Heeger was also at Penn. He moved to UC Santa Barbara in 1982.
The prize was also a rare win for Japan, a country that has claimed just nine of the prizes despite its technological prowess and innovation in product development. In addition, many Japanese Nobelists have conducted their work abroad. This dearth of prizes has led to debate in Japan over whether the educational system fosters rote learning over creative thinking.
The prizes will be awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize originator Alfred Nobel’s death.
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Times staff writer Maura Reynolds in Moscow contributed to this story. McFarling reported from Los Angeles and Gorman from Santa Barbara.
