Walter H. Brattain The Nobel Prize in Physics 1956

biography and other

The American physicist Walter H. Brattain (1902-1987), a co-inventor of the transistor, devoted much of his life to research on surface states.

Although he was born in Amoy, China (February 10, 1902), Walter Houser Brattain spent the early part of his life in the northwest of the United States. He was raised in the state of Washington on a cattle ranch owned by his parents, Ross R. Brattain and Ottilie Houser, and earned his B.S. degree in physics and mathematics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Brattain earned that degree in 1924 and an M.A. degree from the University of Oregon in 1926. He then moved eastward, taking his Ph.D. degree in physics at the University of Minnesota in 1929. Brattain's advisor was John T. Tate, and his thesis was on electron impact in mercury vapor. In 1928 and 1929 he worked at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., and in 1929 was hired by Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Brattain's concerns at Bell Laboratories in the years before World War II were first in the surface physics of tungsten and later in the surfaces of the semiconductors cuprous oxide and silicon. During World War II Brattain devoted his time to developing methods of submarine detection under a contract with the National Defense Research Council at Columbia University.

Following the war, Brattain returned to Bell Laboratories and soon joined the semiconductor division of the newly-organized Solid State Department of the laboratories. William Shockley was the director of the semiconductor division, and early in 1946 he initiated a general investigation of semiconductors that was intended to produce a practical solid state amplifier. Crystals of pure semiconductors (such as silicon or germanium) are very poor conductors at ambient temperatures because the energy that an electron must have in order to occupy a conduction energy level is considerably greater than the thermal energy available to an electron in such a crystal. Heating a semiconductor can excite electrons into conduction states, but it is more practical to increase conductivity by adding impurities to the crystal. A crystal may be doped with a small amount of an element having more electrons than the semiconductor, and those excess electrons will be free to move through the crystal; such a crystal is an n-type semiconductor. One may also add to the crystal a small amount of an element having fewer electrons than the semiconductor, and the electron vacancies, or holes, so introduced will be free to move through the crystal like positively-charged electrons; such a doped crystal is a p-type semiconductor.

At the surface of a semiconductor the level of the conduction band can be altered, which will increase or decrease the conductivity of the crystal. Junctions between metals and n-type or p-type semiconductors, or between the two types of semiconductors, have asymmetric conduction properties, and semiconductor junctions can therefore be used to rectify electrical currents. In a rectifier, a voltage bias that produces a current flow in the low-resistance direction is a forward bias, while a bias in the opposite direction is a reverse bias.

Semiconductor rectifiers were familiar devices by the end of World War II, and Shockley hoped to produce a new device that would have a variable resistance and hence could be used as an amplifier. He proposed a design in which an electric field was applied across the thickness of a thin slab of a semiconductor. The conductivity of the semiconductor changed only by a small fraction of the expected amount when the field was applied, which John Bardeen (another member of Shockley's division) suggested was due to the existence of energy states for electrons on the surface of the semiconductor.
Walter H. Brattain was born in Amoy, China, on February 10, 1902, the son of Ross R. Brattain and Ottilie Houser. He spent his childhood and youth in the State of Washington and received a B.S. degree from Whitman College in 1924. He was awarded the M.A. degree by the University of Oregon in 1926 and the Ph.D. degree by the University of Minnesota in 1929. Dr. Brattain has been a member of the Bell Laboratories technical staff since 1929. The chief field of his research has been the surface properties of solids. His early work was concerned with thermionic emission and adsorbed layers on tungsten. He continued on into the field of rectification and photo-effects at semiconductor surfaces, beginning with a study of rectification at the surface of cuprous oxide. This work was followed by similar studies of silicon. Since World War II he has continued in the same line of research with both silicon and germanium.

Dr. Brattain's chief contributions to solid state physics have been the discovery of the photo-effect at the free surface of a semiconductor; the invention of the point-contact transistor jointly with Dr. John Bardeen, and work leading to a better understanding of the surface properties of semiconductors, undertaken first with Dr. Bardeen, later with Dr. C.G.B. Garrett, and currently with Dr. P.J. Boddy.

Dr. Brattain received the honorary Doctor of Science degree from Portland University in 1952, from Whitman College and Union College in 1955, and from the University of Minnesota in 1957. In 1952 he was awarded the Stuart Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute, and in 1955 the John Scott Medal. The degree at Union College and the two medals were received jointly with Dr. John Bardeen, in recognition of their work on the transistor. Dr. Brattain is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the Franklin Institute; a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a member of the commission on semiconductors of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and of the Naval Research Advisory Committee.

In 1935 he married the late Dr. Keren (Gilmore) Brattain; they had one son, William Gilmore Brattain. In 1958 he married Mrs. Emma Jane (Kirsch) Miller. Dr. Brattain lives in Summit, New Jersey, near the Murray Hill (N.J.) laboratory of Bell Telephone Laboratories.

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