About Leo Esaki
Leo Esaki (江崎 玲於奈, Esaki Reona; born March 12, 1925) is a Japanese physicist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ivar Giaever and Brian Josephson for his work on tunneling in semiconductors, which led to his invention of the tunnel diode that exploits this phenomenon. His research was done when he was with Sony. He has also contributed in being a pioneer of semiconductor superlattices. Since the death of Yoichiro Nambu in 2015, Esaki is the oldest living Japanese Nobel laureate. == Biography == Leo Esaki was born on March 12, 1925, in Osaka, Japan. Esaki studied physics at Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo), where he received a Bachelor of Science in 1947 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1959. In 1947, he joined the Kobe Kogyo Corporation, before becoming chief physicist at Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (now Sony) in 1956. In 1960, Esaki moved to the United States to join IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he was appointed an IBM Fellow in 1967. In 1992, he returned to Japan, where he subsequently served as President of the University of Tsukuba until 1998. == Research == === Tunneling === In 1957, Esaki recognized that when the p–n junction width of germanium is thinned, the current–voltage characteristic is dominated by the influence of the tunnel effect.
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