Benjamin Lax (29 December 1915, Miskolc, Hungary – 21 April 2015, Newton, Massachusetts) was a solid-state and plasma physicist.
After secondary education at Brooklyn's Boys High School, he received in 1941 his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Cooper Union.
He received in 1949 from MIT his Ph.D. under Sanborn C. Brown with thesis The effect of magnetic field on the breakdown of gases at high frequencies.
[2][3] Lax joined in 1951 MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, where he did research on semiconductors by studying their energy band structure using cyclotron resonance.
[1]In 1960, he was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize for "his fundamental contributions in microwave and infrared spectroscopy of semiconductors.” At MIT he supervised the doctoral dissertations of 36 students.