What did I explore in half a century of research?: What discovery, what invention, where, when?

Abstract

Starting with events in Leo Esaki's student days, the evolutionary path of his research activities in Japan and the United States from 1947 to 1992 is presented in a narrative form, including the discovery of the Esaki tunnel diode at Tokyo in 1957, for which the 1973 Nobel Prize was awarded, and the invention of man-made superlattices and resonant tunnel diodes at New York in 1969, for which the 1998 Japan Prize was awarded, as well as the influence, expressed as "times cited", of his original papers.