Herbert Kroemer
German–American physicist (1928–2024)
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Education
Herbert Kroemer was born on August 25, 1928, in Weimar, State of Thuringia. 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 Diplom 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.
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Career and research
From 1952 to 1968, Kroemer worked in a number of research laboratories in Germany and the United States. In 1968, he was appointed Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1976, focusing its semiconductor research program on the emerging compound semiconductor technology rather than on mainstream silicon technology.
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.
Charles Kittel had published the successful Thermal Physics in 1969, and enlisted Kroemer to edit it for a second edition, which appeared in 1980. Kroemer is also the author of the textbook Quantum Mechanics for Engineering, Materials Science and Applied Physics.
Kroemer retired from UC Santa Barbara in 2012.
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.