Dmitri Z. Garbuzov

Dmitri Z. Garbuzov (1940, Sverdlovsk, Russia - August 2006, Princeton, New Jersey) was one of the pioneers and inventors of room temperature continuous-wave-operating diode lasers and high-power diode lasers.

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 (winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physics), 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 1969. 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.