2009 Nobel Prize in Physics Announced

This morning, the Nobel Prize Committee announced the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics, the most well-known (and still largely well-regarded) award for scientific achievement:

• Charles K. Kao - 1/2 the prize "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication"
• Willard S. Boyle & George E. Smith - 1/4 of the prize each "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit - the CCD sensor"

Kao & Fiber Optics:

Much of the significant work for which Kao has been rightly praised came about while he worked at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories (STL, now known as Nortel Networks) from about 1965 through 1969. Through careful analysis, he showed that the loss of signal in fiber optic cables was a result of impurities in the glass rather than a fundamental flaw in the technology. Manufacturers were able to begin creating fiber optic cables meeting his specifications in 1970, and since then the technology has become crucial to all aspects of our modern communication infrastructures.

Boyle, Smith, and Charge-Coupled Devices (CCDs):

The work of Boyle and Smith was performed at Bell Laboratories about 1970, while Smith was working as a department head under Boyle. The CCD has developed over the years as the leading technology in electronically storing visual information and is now used in digital cameras of all types, ranging from those sold at electronics stores to those mounted on the Hubble Space Telescope to those utilized in medical imaging of various types.

The CCD utilized the then-new Metal Oxide Semiconductor (MOS). The CCD was developed in part as an improvement over the "bucket brigade device" (BBD), which essentially passed information from semiconductor to semiconductor like (you guessed it) bucket brigade passes water along from person to person in buckets.

The CCD, on the other hand, passes the electrical information more continuously by creating "charge bubbles" which are passed along the chain of semiconductors. The charge bubble process was specifically designed to compete with the "magnetic bubble" memory that was being worked on by other Bell Lab groups at the time, in an effort to keep Smith's team from losing resources to the magnetic bubble teams.

According to Smith, the initial discussion which extended the magnetic bubble concept into charge bubbles took he and Boyle less than one hour.

In a discussion lasting not more than an hour, the basic structure of the CCD was sketched out on the blackboard, the principles of operation defined, and some preliminary ideas concerning applications were developed.