About Walter Schottky
Walter Schottky (German: [ˈvaltɐ ˈʃɔtki]; 23 July 1886 – 4 March 1976) was a German physicist and electrical engineer who played a major early role in developing the theory of thermionic emission, invented the screen-grid vacuum tube in 1915, co-invented the ribbon microphone and ribbon loudspeaker along with Erwin Gerlach in 1924, and later made many significant contributions in the areas of semiconductor devices, technical physics, and technology. The Schottky effect (a thermionic emission; important for vacuum tube technology), the Schottky diode (where the depletion layer occurring in it is called the Schottky barrier), the Schottky vacancies (or Schottky defects), the Schottky anomaly (a peak value of the heat capacity), and the Mott–Schottky equation (also Langmuir–Schottky space charge law) are named after him. He conducted research on electrical noise mechanisms (shot noise), space charge, especially in electron tubes, and the barrier layer in semiconductors, which were important for the development of copper oxide rectifiers and transistors. == Biography == Walter Schottky was born on 23 July 1886 in Zurich, Switzerland, the son of mathematician Friedrich Schottky, who had been appointed a professor at the University of Zurich in 1882. The family moved back to Germany in 1892, where his father took up an appointment at the University of Marburg. In 1904, Schottky graduated from Steglitz-Gymnasium in Berlin. He studied under Max Planck and Heinrich Rubens at the University of Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. in 1912 with a thesis titled Zur relativtheoretischen Energetik und Dynamik (On Relativistic Energetics and Dynamics). In 1912, Schottky began his postdoctoral studies at the University of Jena. In 1914, he joined the low-current laboratory of Siemens & Halske in Berlin. He then lectured at the University of Wuerzburg from 1919 to 1922, receiving his habilitation in 1920.
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