Nobel prize-winning Russian physicist dies

Moscow: Russian scientist Zhores Alferov, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for work on semiconductors and lasers, has died at the age of 88, his wife told Russian media on Saturday. Alferov was born in 1930 in present-day Belarus. He was inspired to pursue physics by a teacher at his all-boys school in post-War Minsk, which had been all but destroyed by bombings, according to a short autobiography he wrote about himself for the Nobel-awarding body. He later went on to become a highly regarded researcher at Saint Petersburg’s Loffe Institute, where he spent much of his career as he rose through the country’s scientific community. Alferov became member of the Duma, the lower house of Russian parliament, in 1995. In 2000, he shared the Nobel Prize with German scientist Herbert Kroemer “for developing semiconductor hetero structures used in high-speed- and opto electronics.” Alferov’s work is considered to have transformed satellite and mobile communications, as well as the development of lasers. In his Nobel speech, Alferov called himself “only a modest scientist,” whose place in the world is “small.” — DPA