The death, at a hospital, was announced by Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the Russian Communist Party, according to Tass, the Russian state news agency.
Alferov shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics with two American physicists, Herbert Kroemer and Jack S. Kilby, who were attacking similar problems from the opposite side of the Iron Curtain in the 1960s.
Son of a Stalinist industrial apparatchik, Alferov maintained an ambiguous relationship with the United States throughout his life. He worked closely with American colleagues but rejected market reforms in post-Soviet Russia and served in its parliament as a Communist Party deputy.
He did his research at the Ioffe Institute in Leningrad (today St. Petersburg), whose weightier projects included helping to build the Soviet hydrogen bomb and nuclear submarine fleet.
The three scientists who shared the 2000 prize, working separately, pioneered the development of the heterostructure semiconductor. Scientists had studied semiconductors — materials that conduct a relatively weak and controllable pulse of electricity — since the 1930s, famously focusing on silicon as the most useful. But the transit of electrons through a silicon wafer, known as a homostructure because it consists of one material, proved ineffective at releasing photons, whose energy can be converted to light in the form of a laser beam.
Alferov discovered that a “sandwich” of different materials, or heterostructure, could yield a continuous stream of photons without adding so much electrical current that it would heat the materials to extreme temperatures.
He hit upon the optimal combination of gallium arsenide with aluminum, and in 1968 made his first visit to the United States to deliver a paper summarizing his results. The presentation “produced the impression of an exploded bomb,” Alferov would recall without undue modesty in his Nobel acceptance speech 32 years later.
His research also gave him entree to American colleagues at Bell Labs and IBM, and set off a small-scale laser race that combined comradeship and sharing between individual scientists with dead-serious Cold War rivalry.
Alferov would recall with pride that in the race to build a prototype of a laser that worked at room temperature, he and his team in Leningrad beat Bell Labs in New Jersey by a month. Subsequent perfection of heterostructure lasers and heterotransistors based on combined materials made possible today’s world of LED screens, optically read disks and the fiber-optic technology behind cellphones.
Zhores Ivanovich Alferov was born on March 15, 1930, in Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, painter Marc Chagall’s hometown. His father, Ivan Karpovich Alferov, was a former dockworker who joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and later regaled his two sons with reminiscences of meeting Lenin and Trotsky.
His mother, Anna Vladimirovna Alferov, headed a public organization of housewives, worked as a librarian “and always remained our close friend while bringing us up without discouraging words,” Alferov wrote in his Nobel autobiographical essay.
Communism lifted his father to the role of itinerant industrial manager, and he moved the family across the Soviet Union as he helped carry out Stalin’s five-year plans for rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. He named his eldest son, Marx, after Karl Marx; Zhores was named after assassinated French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès.
Marx was 20 when he died at the front during World War II, to be remembered by his younger brother a half-century later at the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm.
Zhores moved to Leningrad to study physics after the war. He joined the research institute there, founded by the father of the Soviet semiconductor field, Abram Ioffe, in 1953, the year Stalin died.
The times were turbulent but fertile for science, as both the United States and the Soviet Union poured money into research that each hoped would keep it ahead of the other in a superpower competition for supremacy.
“The sensation I felt then could not be compared to anything,” Alferov wrote of his early work at Ioffe.
He stuck with the institute all his life, winning the Lenin Prize, Soviet science’s highest honor, in 1972; becoming director of Ioffe in 1987; and heading the Leningrad-St. Petersburg branch of the Academy of Sciences in 1989. In the mid-1990s, he was obliged to accept support from his old rivals in America. The U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as “Star Wars,” helped finance Ioffe and a half dozen other Russian research centers for several years.
“You could tell it was hard for him to be in this position,” said Michael Stroscio, a University of Illinois physics professor who visited Ioffe to help oversee the Pentagon grant. “He was very professional, but kept his distance.”
Among his survivors is his wife, Tamara Darskaya; their daughter, Olga; and their son, Ivan. A first marriage had produced another daughter, but Alferov rarely spoke of the union.
Alferov had entered politics reluctantly, he told interviewers, his purpose being to revive domestic financing for science. He joined Russia’s parliament, the state Duma, in 1995 as a member of the party supporting the westernizing policies of President Boris Yeltsin, but he switched to the opposition communists in the 1999 parliamentary elections, convinced that Yeltsin’s “young reformers” had brought Russia to the brink of economic ruin. (Yeltsin stunned the world when he resigned less than two weeks later, turning over the presidency to the prime minister, Vladimir Putin.)
Alferov served as a communist deputy, but seldom attended Duma sessions and maintained his focus on bills affecting science and technology.
“He probably lost a bit of prestige among the intelligentsia for joining the Communists,” said Yuri Korgonyuk, a commentator at the Moscow political think tank Indem. “But everyone could see he wasn’t really a politician.”
Faith in science and its universal benefits remained Alferov’s true credo. “All that was made by human beings, in principle, was made due to science,” he said after accepting the Nobel Prize.