Discoveries on the Surface of Semiconductors

A. L. Aseev

A decade ago no one could assume that the word “nanoelectronics” will be commonly used not only by scientists but also by politicians of developed countries, including Russia.

Anatoli V. Rzhanov was a member of the Academy of Scien ces of the USSR and the first Director of the Institute of Semiconductor Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which was recently called after A. V. Rzhanov. In 1971, he wrote the monograph Electron Processes on the Surface of Semiconductors, which has become a classical book, describing the results of an approximately 40-years’ period of semiconductor-surface research. This research was inspired by the activities of academician I. E. Tamm, who theoretically demonstrated the possibility of existence of special states of electrons on the crystal surface. In the late 1940s, further experimental investigations allowed the discovery of the transistor effect, which is one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 20th century.

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