Alfred ("Alf") Rodney Adams FRS (born 1939[3][4]) is a British physicist who invented the strained-layer quantum-well laser.
His grandmother had died from tuberculosis and his father was born with TB thus being excused from school on medical grounds, before working as cobbler, boxer and gym owner.
He also completed his PhD at Leicester with Professor Walter Eric Spear on Orthorhombic crystal systems, before doing postdoctoral research in Physics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, where he met and married his wife Helga.
[2] His nomination for the Royal Society reads: Distinguished for his pioneering work on the application of high pressure techniques to the study of semiconducting materials, Professor Adams has done much to advance the use of strain as an important variable in understanding the basic physics of devices.
His contributions include the first demonstration of the Gamma-L-X ordering of the conduction band minima in GaAs, the first direct observations of scattering by the central cell potential of impurities, the proposal and experimental confirmation of intervalence band absorption as an important loss mechanism in semiconductor lasers and the prediction that the threshold current in a quantum-well laser can be greatly reduced if the wells are grown in a state of compressive stress.