Abram Ioffe

Abram Fedorovich Ioffe was a Russian physicist, born October 29, 1880 in Romny, Poltava Governorate and died October 14, 1960 in Leningrad, remembered as the father of Soviet physics and as a founder of semiconductor thermoelectric energy conversion. He graduated from the Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology in 1902, worked as an assistant to Wilhelm Rontgen in Munich from 1902 to 1904, earned a doctorate on the electrical conductivity of dielectric crystals in 1905, and became a professor at Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University in 1913, the institute he built into the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute, renamed in 1933, training many of the physicists who later led Soviet nuclear and semiconductor research. Having predicted as early as 1931 that semiconductors would play a major practical role in future technology, he discovered in 1950 that doped semiconductors exhibit an unusually strong thermoelectric effect, founding the modern field of semiconductor thermoelectric energy conversion and proposing that the effect could power household refrigeration; in 1957 he built a thermoelectric lamp that generated its own electricity from waste heat to power a radio, work that led to the commercial thermoelectric material bismuth telluride and to the Ioffe number, a figure of merit still used to rate thermoelectric devices. He was removed from his institute directorship in 1950 during the Soviet anti-cosmopolitan campaign, and received the Stalin Prize in 1942 and the Lenin Prize in 1961.