Smith, George Elwood, 1930–, American physicist, b. White Plains, N.Y., Ph.D., Univ. of Chicago, 1959. Smith was a researcher at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., from 1959 until his retirement in 1986. In 2009 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Willard Boyle and Charles Kao. Smith and Boyle were cited for their invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD), an imaging semiconductor circuit that laid the foundation for digital photography. CCDs also are used in video cameras, medical diagnostics equipment, telescopes, and other imaging technology. Smith also did work on semiconducting ferroelectrics, electroluminescence, transition-metal oxides, and devices made with submicron lithography.
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