orig. Esaki Reiona
born March 12, 1925, Ōsaka, Japan
Japanese physicist.
In 1956 he became chief physicist of the Sony Corp., and in 1960 he was awarded an IBM fellowship for further research in the U.S., subsequently joining IBM's research laboratories in Yorktown, N.Y. He worked intensively on tunneling in semiconductors and constructed the tunnel diode, which found broad applications in computers and other devices. He shared a 1973 Nobel Prize with Ivar Giaever (b. 1929) and Brian Josephson .