Santa Barbara, Ca.—Arthur Gossard, professor of materials and of computer and electrical engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has been awarded the 2001 James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials by the American Physical Society. The prize, sponsored by IBM, consists of a $5,000 award.
Gossard was cited, "For more than twenty-five years of major and continuing contributions to the science and technology of molecular beam epitaxy, and for the growth of heterogeneous compound semiconductor structures that have furthered both device applications and physical understanding of low dimensional structures."
Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) is a key technology for enabling the manufacture of the compound semiconductors so important for wireless and fiber-optic devices. Compound semiconductors deliver the speed, bandwidth, and flexibility these devices require far better than traditional silicon semiconductors.
The McGroddy Prize will be presented at the APS annual March meeting held this year in Seattle, Wash.
Having begun work at Bell Laboratories in 1960, Gossard was a "distinguished member" of the technical staff when he left in 1987 to accept his present position at UCSB.
Gossard is an author of nearly 650 articles and a holder of 14 patents. Among those papers is the one that reports the research on the fractional quantum Hall effect for which the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded. Gossard synthesized the materials used in the experiment.
A member of the National Academy of Engineering, he shared the 1984 Oliver F. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize, also bestowed by the American Physical Society.
[Note: For a photograph of Gossard, go to www.engineering.ucsb.edu and follow the links to the press release and from there to the high resolution version.]