Zeev,
<<certainly not 1 A as mentioned in Joe's first "hearsay" on the subject>>
I said, at first, <<interatomic distances are 1 to 2 Angstrem, not 5 A>>, and in next post I spelled out exacly, for the case of Si, atomic nearest neigbor separation is 2.3 A. Your 5 A would mean Si is lighter than water.
<<the poor chap that first found tunneling through "barriers" it was Izaka>>
That chap introduced himself to me as "Leo Esaki", and he discovered "tunnel diod", which has no barriers. Just a narrow enough p-n junction.
Tunneling was first studied theoretically in the early days of quantum mechanics, in late 1920s. The radioactive decay of nuclei was attributed to tunneling at that time and in early 1930s. Then still at that time Schottki studied tunneling in the context of solid state, in metal-semiconductor junctions. This work, however, was not unambigous. Esaki made first unambigous observation of tunneling in pn diodes, while graduate student at University of Tokio. Ivar Giavier (at GE labs) studied electron tunneling in superconductors. Brian Josephson (while a grad student at Cambridge U) showed theoretically that there may be another kind of tunneling in superconductors, that of Cooper pairs, which was subsequenly observed by Anderson and coworkers at Bell Labs. The three (Esaki, Giavier, Josephson) shared a Nobel prize. IBM was not in the picture at all, except that Esaki worked there after he moved to US.
Joe |
