Dmitri Z. Garbuzov

Dmitri Z. Garbuzov (1940 to 2006) was a Russian-born physicist and inventor, one of the pioneers of room-temperature continuous-wave diode lasers and of high-power diode lasers. Born in Sverdlovsk, he graduated from the physics department of Leningrad State University in 1962 and joined Zhores Alferov's group at the Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute in 1964, where heterojunctions in semiconductors were being studied. In 1970 his team there and a competing team at Bell Telephone Laboratories attained the first room-temperature continuous-wave diode lasers almost simultaneously. He later developed practical high-power, high-efficiency diode lasers from visible to mid-infrared wavelengths, and after perestroika built a research group in the West that served three American companies. He died in Princeton, New Jersey.