Obituary of Thomas Fredrick Deutsch

Thomas Fredrick Deutsch passed away on July 17, 2006 of complications from a long fight with two forms of cancer. Despite this tough battle, Tom remained vital and active to the end of his life. His life’s work was incredibly broad and zestful and focused on the physics of lasers and their use in many fields of science, medicine, and the people that worked with them.

Tom was born in Vienna, Austria on April 24, 1932 and lived there until he was 6, at which point his family fled from the Nazi takeover. With his family, he then moved to Paris until they obtained a visa for the United States. His family settled in Cleveland, where his father, a doctor, established his medical practice.

Tom’s university experience started at Cornell, where he majored in Engineering Physics and graduated cum laude. After graduation, he moved to Harvard to partake in the exciting postwar intellectual life of Cambridge and to begin his PhD studies with Bill Paul in solid-state physics. His interests then turned into the specific area of semiconductor physics, which thanks to the emergence of solid-state electronics was a vibrant and fast-moving area. After graduating, he entered the professional world at Raytheon Research Lab, Waltham, MA. At that time many large industries, particularly those in aerospace, were in the process of building major efforts in fundamental research. Tom’s semiconductor research increasingly focused on the radiative properties of compound semiconductors. In fact, the discovery of laser action in diodes was the subject of an early paper he co-authored. Thus, Tom found his life’s work the discovery of new lasers and their use in an increasingly large number of applications from chemistry to medicine.

During his time at Raytheon from 1960 to 1974, Tom became a leader in laser discovery and development, which in the mid 60’s were at a point of major innovation and discovery. As a Principal Research Scientist, he along with other major researchers, became a font of new ideas and advancements in laser devices and types. Tom and his collaborators were major contributors in dye-laser discovery and science, CO2 lasers and their molecular dynamics, and a host of other unusual molecular laser forms. In addition, Tom’s past experience in semiconductor science allowed him to make major contributions to the understanding of semiconductor high-power infrared-laser windows.

In 1974 Raytheon began to shift away from such fundamental studies and Tom joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, where he immediately found a home in the Quantum Electronics Group. The group’s interest in molecular lasers for chemical-bond-selective excitation led to a major body of work in optical-pumped molecular lasers, and later in the use of infrared lasers in photochemistry. Tom’s interest in this work led him to team up with Rick Osgood and Dan Ehrlich to explore the use of UV lasers to drive laser chemistry for electronic applications. Tom made major contributions in this area by making the first demonstration of highly doped semiconductor layers using UV excimer lasers to simultaneously photodissociate dopant-containing gases and heat surfaces. The combination of short pulses and optical absorption depths led to the realization that extremely thin, highly doped semiconductor layers could be formed in Si and GaAs. This work seeded many years of research on laser-doped solar cells, ultrashallow electrical contacts, and precise semiconductor melting. Tom and his two colleagues were awarded the Optical Society of America Wood prize for this research and as well as other UV-laser techniques, which used continuous wave lasers.

While at Lincoln Laboratory, Tom began initial contacts and exploration of the use of lasers in medicine. These initial experiments in far-UV epidermal sensitivity enabled Tom in June 1984 to move to the Wellman Research Laboratories of Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, where he engaged in studies of the applications of lasers to medicine. This work caused Tom to become a leading figure in the application of lasers to medicine and to being appointed Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and named an APS Fellow. His research at Wellman centered on laser-tissue interactions and optical diagnostic techniques for medicine.

In the latter part of his career, Tom served the scientific community well in another professorial manner. He befriended many young and mid-career scientists and listened carefully to their professional concerns and questions. He then spoke quietly and offered sage advice impartially and with great kindness but never flinched from telling them the hard truths of professional life. He will be sorely missed by his many friends and colleagues.