Walter Eric Spear
Walter Eric Spear ( born January 20, 1921 in Frankfurt am Main, † February 21, 2008 in Dundee ) was a British solid-state physicist, who was a pioneer in amorphous semiconductors.
Life
Spear went to school in Frankfurt ( High School 1938). Since his father ( a photographer ) was Jewish, he fled from persecution by the Nazis with his family to London. During World War II he was interned briefly and then served from 1940 to 1946 in the Royal Pioneer Corps and the Royal Artillery. He then earned a degree in physics at the Regent Street Polytechnic (later the University of Westminster ) in London and studied at Birkbeck College, University of London at John Desmond Bernal and Werner Ehrenberg in the Laboratory for Crystallography, where he received his doctorate in 1950. He developed there, X-ray machines for crystallography and their electron optics. The apparatus was Bernal 1950 to Maurice Wilkins, where they played a role in the crystallographic studies of DNA.
Spear thereafter remained initially at Birkbeck College, and went in 1953 as a Lecturer at the University College of Leicester, where he worked on films of amorphous selenium, the conductivity of which he examined. His research also led to collaboration with industry ( Xerox, EMI). In the 1960s, he dealt for example with transport by polarons and electronic transport in simple rare gas crystals. During this time, his long-time collaboration with Peter LeComber, who earned his doctorate with him began. He became a professor at the University of Dundee in 1968. There he dealt in particular with amorphous solids such as amorphous silicon (thin in the form of films ), where he worked with the theoretician Nevill Mott. In particular, he pointed with his group, that with the method of production of films they use amorphous silicon ( and germanium) of gas discharges, the doping could be well controlled via the gas phase. They presented the mid-1970s forth a pn-junction amorphous silicon and pursued its applications in photovoltaics. In the 1980s, his group demonstrated field-effect transistors with amorphous silicon and in collaboration with scientists from the University of Edinburgh ( Alan Owen and others) storage elements made of amorphous silicon. In 1990, he retired.
He was an amateur musician (cello) and married since 1952 with Hilda King, with whom he had two daughters.