Jan Tauc

Jan Tauc (; 15 April 1922 – 28 December 2010) was a Czech-American physicist who introduced the concepts of Tauc gap and Tauc plot to the optical characterization of solids. Born in Bohemia, he emigrated to the United States in 1969, where he received citizenship in 1978, During the war, Tauc attended a technical school while working at a weapons factory and studying physics independently. Within a few years after the war he obtained a university degree in electrical engineering. In 1949 he defended a PhD on dielectric antennas at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He then became interested in semiconductor physics and built the first point-contact transistor in Czechoslovakia. and between 1964 and 1969 worked as professor of experimental physics at the Charles University in Prague. While attending the fourth International Conference on the Physics of Semiconductors in Rochester, New York, he convinced the organizers to choose Prague for the next meeting in 1960, in which he acted as a local chair. This was the first such event in a Soviet bloc country.

While Tauc's early work mainly concerned photovoltaic, thermoelectric and optical properties of crystalline semiconductors, in the mid-1960s he focused on amorphous semiconductors, in particular hydrogenated silicon, which became his major research topic until retirement. In 1966 he published an article on the electronic and optical properties of amorphous germanium that laid the foundation for semi-empirical studies of amorphous materials and introduced the concepts of the Tauc gap and the Tauc plot. At Brown University, he co-authored a patent for a method of characterizing thin films using transient photomodulation spectroscopy.

In 1947, Tauc married Vera Koubelova, who died in 2008. They had a daughter, Elena (born 1951), and a son, Jan (born 1954).

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