Dmitri Z. Garbuzov

Who was Dmitri Z. Garbuzov?

Dmitri Z. Garbuzov was one of the pioneers and inventors of room temperature continuous-wave-operating diode lasers and high-power diode lasers.

The first room-temperature, continuous-wave diode lasers were successfully invented, developed, and almost simultaneously demonstrated at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad, Russia by a team including Garbuzov and Zhores Alferov, and by the competing team of I. Hayashi and M. Panish at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Both teams attained this accomplishment in 1970. Garbuzov was also responsible for the development of practical high-power, high-efficiency, diode lasers at a variety of wavelength bands from visible to mid-infrared wavelengths.

Following perestroika, Garbuzov, who had served as an accomplished and respected scientist and manager within the Soviet scientific research system, established a research group in the West which employed multiple Russian émigré scientists and simultaneously contributed to three American for-profit enterprises.