Leo Esaki

Reona Esaki (江崎 玲於奈 Esaki Reona, born March 12, 1925), also known as Leo Esaki, is a Japanese physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Ivar Giaever and Brian David Josephson for his discovery of the phenomenon of electron tunneling. He is known for his invention of the Esaki diode, which exploited that phenomenon. This research was done when he was with Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (now known as Sony). He has also contributed in being a pioneer of the semiconductor superlattice while he was with IBM.

Biography

He was born in Osaka, Japan. He studied physics at the University of Tokyo, where he received his B.Sc. in 1947 and his Ph.D. in 1959. Esaki was awarded the Nobel Prize for research conducted around 1958 regarding electron tunneling in solids. He moved to the United States in 1960 and joined the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, where he became an IBM Fellow in 1967. His first paper on the semiconductor superlattice was published when he was with IBM. A comment by Esaki in a 1987 number of Current Contents regarding the original paper on superlattices notes: