John Battiscombe Gunn

2026-01-21 09:31:05

John Battiscombe Gunn (Cairo, Egypt, May 13, 1928 – December 2, 2008, New York, USA) was a British physicist (who spent most of his life working in the United States). He discovered the Gunn effect, which led to the creation of the Gunn diode, also named after him - a low-cost source of microwave oscillations that does not require vacuum tubes. Gunn's research in solid-state physics and electronics concerns microwave radiation, the quantum theory of acoustic wave amplification in semiconductors, the Hall effect, quantum electronics, and the application of microwave radiation in astrophysics. He was awarded the Morris Liebmann Prize (1969) and the John Scott Prize (1971).