Morton B. Panish (born April 8, 1929) is an American physical chemist who, with Izuo Hayashi, developed a room-temperature continuous wave semiconductor laser in 1970.
[2] From 1954 to 1957 Panish worked for Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where he studied the chemical thermodynamics of molten salts.
The primary contract of this division, with the United States Air Force, was to develop vehicles for the reentry of thermonuclear weapons into the atmosphere.
[1][2] In June 1964, Panish began working at Bell Labs in the Solid State Electronics Research Laboratory, a group headed by physicist John Galt.
The idea was to place a material like GaAs, with a smaller band gap, between two layers of a material such as aluminum gallium arsenide (a solid solution of AlAs and GaAs) that had a larger band gap; this confined the charge carriers and the optical field (the light) to this layer, reducing the current needed for lasing.
Panish experimented with making wafers using a new form of liquid-phase epitaxy while Hayashi tested the laser properties.
Over the Memorial Day weekend in 1970, while Panish was at home, Hayashi tried a diode and it emitted a continuous-wave beam with just over 24 degrees Celsius and he was able to plot the complete spectrum with the very slow equipment available at the time.
After the work on double heterostructure lasers Panish continued to demonstrate variants of the laser structures with other collaborators in work done through the late 1970s, but the major thrust of his work for the rest of his career, until 1992, was to exploit the new opportunities presented by the use of Molecular Beam Epitaxy to produce lattice matched semiconductor heterostructures in III-V systems other than GaAs-AlGaAs for other devices (detectors, quantum well physics and devices, ultra fast hererostructure transistors) and for the study of the physics of small layered structures.