Walter Brattain

Brattain, Walter

 

Born Feb. 10, 1902, in Hsiamen, China. American physicist.

Brattain studied at universities in Walla Walla, Wash., and in Arizona and Minnesota. A teacher at various universities in the USA, he has been a professor at a college in Walla Walla since 1963. Brattain has studied the surface properties of semiconductors (the determination of the rate of recombination and distribution of potential on the surface of a semiconductor). A number of his works have been devoted to the study of the semiconductor properties of copper oxide, the study of the optical properties of germanium films, and the measurement of conductivity under the action of irradiation by α-particles. He won the Nobel Prize in 1956 (with J. Bardeen and W. Shockley) for creating semiconductor transistors and studying the physical principles of their operation.

WORKS

“The Transistor: A Semiconductor Triode. Nature of the Forward Current in Germanium Point Contacts.” The Physical Review, 1948, vol. 74, no. 2, pp. 230-31. (With J. Bardeen.)
“Physical Principles Involved in Transistor Action.” The Physical Review, 1949, vol. 75, no. 8, pp. 1208-25. (With J. Bardeen.)