Ovshinsky Prize Lecture CHALCOGENIDE GLASSES AS MULTIFUNCTIONAL PHOTONIC MATERIALS

First of all I would like to thank my colleagues from the Forum of Chalcogeniders and especially to thank Prof. Stanford R. Ovshinsky for the great honor offered to me: his prestigious Prize for 2005. Stanford Ovshinsky is a great personality of our times, who combines successfully the ability of engineer with the open mind of the scientist. He remarked as early as 1960 the importance of the new group of materials, the chalcogenide glasses (ChG), that are not only excellent materials for the physics of non-crystalline semiconductors but also materials with wide applications in optoelectronics, electronics and informatics. I want to start my lecture by remembering the old times when I have had the occasion to work in the Laboratory of Professor Boris Kolomiets in former Leningrad (Russian Federation). The famous team working under the leadership of Kolomiets was for me not only a rich source of ideas and example of hard and efficient work in chalcogenides, but, also, a school of high intellectual and moral qualities. Along the time I collaborated with the scientists originated from this school: V. M. Liubin, T. N. Mamontova, T. F. Mazets, E. A. Lebedev, C. Tsendin and A. V. Kolobov. Other great personalities in the world, stimulated me in the study of non-crystalline materials, including the chalcogenides: Sir Nevill Mott, Nobel Prize for Physics (1977), who highl