My years at the NatLab

 

 

I received this silicon wafer as a farewell gift upon leaving the NatLab (= Natuurkundig Laboratorium), as the Philips Research Laboratory in Eindhoven was called. My six years at the NatLab were decisive for my career as a theoretical physicist. The discovery of conductance quantization in GaAs point contacts launched me into mesoscopic physics, which is still my field of research. My collaboration with Henk van Houten formed my physical intuition and taught me how theory and experiment can go hand-in-hand. This was the most intense scientific collaboration I have experienced in my career and I am deeply grateful for it.

The wafer shows drawings from some of the papers I wrote with my NatLab colleagues, many of them collected in the review Henk and I wrote together.

Carlo Beenakker

Here is an overview of researchers from the Nat.Lab., over the 50-year period up to its shutdown in 2022.