威拉德·博伊尔1924—2011

生平

博伊尔出生于加拿大新斯科舍省的阿默斯特。高中毕业后加入加拿大海军并参加了第二次世界大战。1947年、1948年和1950年分别在麦吉尔大学取得理学学士学位、理学硕士学位和博士学位。1953年，他加入美国的贝尔实验室工作。1969年与美国物理学家乔治·E·史密斯共同发明电荷耦合元件（CCD）。2009年，博伊尔与乔治·E·史密斯和高锟三人共同获得诺贝尔物理学奖。

Willard Sterling Boyle (August 19, 1924 – May 7, 2011) was a Canadian applied physicist who shared one half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics with George E. Smith for their invention of the charge-coupled device.

As director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at Bellcomm, Boyle helped select lunar landing sites and provided support for the Apollo space program.

Early life and education

Willard Sterling Boyle was born on August 19, 1924, in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and moved to Quebec with his parents when he was about 2-years-old. He was homeschooled by his mother until the age of 14, when he began his formal education at Lower Canada College in Montreal.

Boyle attended McGill University, but his education was interrupted in 1943 when he joined the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II. He was loaned to the Royal Canadian Naval Air Service, where he learned how to land Spitfires on aircraft carriers as the war ended. After resuming his studies at McGill, Boyle gained a B.Sc. in 1947, and an M.Sc. the following year. In 1950, he received his Ph.D. with a thesis on mass spectrometry.

Career

After receiving his doctorate, Boyle spent one year at Canada's Radiation Lab and two years teaching physics at the Royal Military College of Canada.

In 1953, Boyle joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he invented the first continuously operating ruby laser with Don Nelson in 1962,

and was named on the first patent for a semiconductor injection laser. He was made director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at the Bell Labs subsidiary Bellcomm in 1962, providing support for the Apollo space program and helping to select lunar landing sites. He returned to Bell Labs in 1964, working on the development of integrated circuits. Boyle was Executive Director of Research at Bell Labs from 1975 until his retirement in 1979.

Charge-coupled device

In 1969, Boyle and George E. Smith invented the charge-coupled device (CCD), for which they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009. The CCD allowed NASA to send clear pictures to Earth back from space. It is also the technology that powers many digital cameras today. Smith said of their invention: "After making the first couple of imaging devices, we knew for certain that chemistry photography was dead." Eugene Gordon and Mike Tompsett, two now-retired colleagues from Bell Labs, claim that its application to photography was not invented by Boyle.

Personal life and death

In retirement, Boyle split his time between Halifax and Wallace, Nova Scotia. In Wallace, he helped launch an art gallery with his wife, Betty, a landscape artist. He was married to Betty since 1946 and had four children, 10 grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren.

In his later years, Boyle suffered from kidney disease. Due to complications from this disease, he died on May 7, 2011, at a hospital in Truro, Nova Scotia, at the age of 86.