Brian Ridley

Brian Kidd Ridley FRS (born 2 March 1931) is a British solid-state physicist specialising in semiconductor theory. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Essex.[2]

Brian Ridley

FRS
Born (1931-03-02) 2 March 1931[1]
Newcastle Upon Tyne
NationalityBritish
Alma materUniversity of Durham
Known for
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsUniversity of Essex

Education

Ridley was educated at the University of Durham.[3] He received a BSc degree in physics in 1953 and completed his doctoral studies in 1957.[1][4]

Career

Ridley began his career as a research physicist in the solid-state physics division of the Mullard Research Laboratories in Redhill, Surrey (1956–1964).[1][4] In 1964, he joined the University of Essex as a lecturer in physics, later becoming a senior lecturer (1967), reader (1971) and finally professor of physics (1984), before retiring in 2008.[1][2] He has held distinguished visiting professorial appointments at Cornell University (1967) and the Danish Technical University (1969), and has held research appointments at Princeton, Stanford, Lund, Santa Barbara, Oregon, and Eindhoven.[1][5]

Research

Ridley has conducted work on negative differential resistance (NDR), instabilities and hot-electron transport in semiconductors. In the early 1960s,[4] he jointly discovered the electron transfer mechanism (Ridley–Watkins–Hilsum effect) which underlies microwave generation in Gunn diodes, and he was the first to discover the impurity barrier mechanism for NDR, and to demonstrate its existence in germanium. He was also the first to describe the consequences of NDR instabilities in terms of propagating dipole domains and current filaments. The existence of these nonlinear entities has been verified in a wide variety of solids. His work on acoustoelectric instabilities led to his invention of the microsonic analogue of the laser. He has made original contributions to the theory of electron transitions in solids, particularly impurity scattering and multiphonon processes. This work is the subject of his monograph Quantum Processes in Semiconductors, widely used as a reference text.[5][6]

He wrote three popular books, Time, Space and Things (1976), which has been translated into multiple languages, The Physical Environment (1979) and On Science (2001).[1][6][7]

Awards and honours

Ridley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1994.[6] In 2001, the Institute of Physics awarded him the Dirac Medal in recognition of his four-decade long influence on the semiconductor theory.[8][7]

Selected works

Textbooks
  • Ridley, B.K. (2017). Hybrid phonons in nanostructures. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-878836-2.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Ridley, B. K. (1999). Quantum processes in semiconductors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-850579-5.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Ridley, B. K. (1996). Electrons and Phonons in Semiconductor Multilayers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-511-52934-4.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Books
  • Ridley, B. K. (2016). Reforming science: beyond belief. Exeter: Andrews UK Limited. ISBN 1-84540-194-8.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Ridley, B. K. (2001). On Science. Thinking in Action. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-134-53350-3.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Ridley, B. K. (1976). Time, space, and things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-48486-2.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Ridley, B. K. (1979). The physical environment. Chicester: Ellis Horwood Halsted Press. ISBN 0-85312-142-7.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Research papers
  • Ridley, B.K. (1982). "The electron-phonon interaction in quasi-two-dimensional semiconductor quantum-well structures". Journal of Physics C: Solid State Physics. IOP Publishing. 15 (28): 5899–5917. doi:10.1088/0022-3719/15/28/021. ISSN 0022-3719.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Ridley, B.K. (1963). "Specific Negative Resistance in Solids". Proceedings of the Physical Society. IOP Publishing. 82 (6): 954–966. doi:10.1088/0370-1328/82/6/315. ISSN 0370-1328.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Ridley, B.K.; Watkins, T.B. (1961). "The Possibility of Negative Resistance Effects in Semiconductors". Proceedings of the Physical Society. IOP Publishing. 78 (2): 293–304. doi:10.1088/0370-1328/78/2/315. ISSN 0370-1328.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

References
  1. "Ridley, Brian Kidd". Who's Who. ukwhoswho.com. 2017 (online ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription or UK public library membership required) (subscription required)
  2. "Emeritus Professors - School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering". University of Essex. Retrieved 2017-12-14.
  3. "Graduates". Durham Colleges Gazette, 1950-1953. 4 (25): 3.
  4. "New Scientist". 22 (390). Reed Business Information. 7 May 1964: 380. ISSN 0262-4079. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. "EC/1994/32: Ridley, Brian Kidd". The Royal Society. Retrieved 13 December 2017.
  6. "Brian Ridley". London: Royal Society. One or more of the preceding sentences may incorporate text from the royalsociety.org website where "all text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." "Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 2017-07-10. Retrieved 2017-12-16.CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  7. "Institute Matters". Physics World. IOP Publishing. 13 (12): 55–62. 2000. doi:10.1088/2058-7058/13/12/44. ISSN 0953-8585.
  8. Physics, Institute of. "Dirac medal recipients". Institute of Physics - For physics • For physicists • For all. Retrieved 2017-12-13.
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