Nobel Prize 2009 in Physics

1. The invention of the CCD sensor.

Willard Boyle, George Smith, both of them are from the USA.

2. Outstanding advances in the field of transmission of light via fiber-optic communication lines.

Charles Kao, United Kingdom / United States

The essence of the invention . On September 8, 1969, two American engineers from Bell Labs (AT & T Bell Labs) invented and later independently constructed the world's first microcircuit, working on the principle of bubble memory , that is, when the charges under the influence of an electromagnetic field move in a semiconductor film as whole “bubbles”, refusing to divide into smaller fragments. Boyle and Smith created an analogue of such "bubbles" in the microchip, where the charge accumulates and can move in the indicated direction. Therefore, a new device was called a “charge bubble device”, and later a CCD (charge-coupled device).

Almost immediately, CCDs began to be supplemented with silicon photodiodes using a photoelectric effect to produce a charge. This is how the first CCD sensors appeared that after decades made a revolution in digital photography, astronomy, television, medical diagnostics and other fields.

Interestingly, for explaining the photoelectric effect, Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921, and this was his only prize in life.

Returning to the invention of Boyle and Smith, after a few years, the American company Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation (now Fairchild Semiconductor) started mass production of CCD sensors. The first consumer digital camera was manufactured by Sony in 1981 (the Japanese invested huge sums of money in refining the technology). Later, CCD sensors became the basis for entire classes of digital devices of the new generation (video cameras, cameras, telescopes, etc.). Recently, this outstanding invention turned 40 years old.
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The inventors of the CCD sensor shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with a native of China, a citizen of Great Britain and the United States Charles Kao (Charles Kao), who was awarded "for outstanding achievements in the field of transmission of light via fiber-optic communication lines".

British engineer Charles Cao conducted his research in the 60s of the last century, when signal transmission over fiber at a distance of twenty meters was considered a great achievement. The standard attenuation level was 100 dB / km. Optical fiber had a limited scope, for example, used in medicine to transfer images from the patient's stomach.

In 1966, Kao published a scientific paper with a theoretical rationale that you can reduce attenuation to 20 dB / km, that is, the transmission distance can be increased as much as 100 km, if you increase the transparency of the glass. It was an incredible breakthrough, because no one could have imagined before that this was theoretically possible. Kao's work was the first on this topic, and generated a whole wave of scientific research from other researchers. In 1971, the American company Corning Glass Works manufactured the first kilometer sample of fused silica fiber.

The new material allowed us to reduce attenuation to 17 dB / km, and the addition of germanium dioxide reduced it to 4 dB / km. Nowadays, better optical fiber samples have attenuation values ​​of less than 0.2 dB / km.