Benjamin Lax (29 December 1915,

Miskolc Miskolc ( , , ; Czech language, Czech and sk, Miškovec; german: Mischkolz; yi, script=Latn, Mishkoltz; ro, Mișcolț) is a city in northeastern Hungary, known for its heavy industry. With a population of 161,265 (1 Jan 2014) Miskolc is the ...

, Hungary – 21 April 2015,

Newton, Massachusetts Newton is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is approximately west of downtown Boston. Newton resembles a patchwork of thirteen villages, without a city center. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, the population of Ne ...

) was a solid-state and plasma physicist. (with selected bibliography)

Biography

Benjamin Lax immigrated in 1926 with his family to the United States. After secondary education at Brooklyn's

Boys High School Single-sex education, also known as single-gender education and gender-isolated education, is the practice of conducting education with male and female students attending separate classes, perhaps in separate buildings or schools. The practice of ...

, he received in 1941 his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from

Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...

. After being drafted into the US Army in 1942, he was assigned to MIT's Radiation Laboratory to work on the development of radar. He received in 1949 from MIT his Ph.D. under Sanborn C. Brown with thesis ''The effect of magnetic field on the breakdown of gases at high frequencies''. Lax joined in 1951 MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, where he did research on semiconductors by studying their energy band structure using cyclotron resonance. These pioneering studies of germanium and silicon played an essential role in the development of semiconductor devices. Lax was a co-inventor on an early patent for semiconductor lasers. He became in 1958 Head of the Solid-State Division and in 1964 Associate Director of the Laboratory. From 1960 to 1981 he was the director of the Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory. From 1964 until his retirement in 1986 he was a physics professor at MIT. In 1960, he was awarded the

Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize The Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize is an annual award given by the American Physical Society "to recognize and encourage outstanding theoretical or experimental contributions to condensed matter physics." It was endowed by AT&T Bell Lab ...

for "his fundamental contributions in microwave and infrared spectroscopy of semiconductors.” At MIT he supervised the doctoral dissertations of 36 students. He was the co-author, with Kenneth J. Button, of the 1962 book “Microwave Ferrites and Ferrimagnetics”. He was elected in 1962 to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

and in 1969 to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

in 1969. He was also elected in 1957 a Fellow of the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...

and in 1981 a Fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

. He was a

Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

for the academic year 1981–1982. In 2009 he was inducted into The

Hall of Fame. He was predeceased by his wife, Blossom Cohen Lax. Upon his death, he was survived by two sons and a granddaughter.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lax, Benjamin American physicists 1915 births 2015 deaths Cooper Union alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Physical Society Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science MIT Lincoln Laboratory people Boys High School (Brooklyn) alumni Scientists from New York (state) Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize winners American plasma physicists Hungarian emigrants to the United Kingdom