Bencion Moyseyovych Vul is a prominent Soviet physicist, Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1939), Hero of Socialist Labor (1969). He graduated from Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in 1928.
Since 1932 he worked in the Physical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, since 1933 he managed an organized by himself laboratory of Physics of dielectrics (now the Laboratory Physics of Semiconductors). Since 1951 he was the member of the Main editorial office of BSE (Big Soviet Encyclopedia).
Major works on physics of dielectrics and semiconductors. Vul installed the nature of the edge effect of the breakdown of solid dielectrics and breakdown characteristics of compressed gases in strongly inhomogeneous fields, and developed the basic theory of aerosols filtration (1937). He discovered (1944) new ferroelectric - barium titanate BaTiO3 (USSR State Prize, 1946), which gave rise to many scientific papers and practical application in the field of ferroelectricity. A number of papers devoted to the study of p-n-junctions in semiconductors and theory fundamentals of semiconductor devices.
Under the direction of Vul first in the USSR laboratory samples of semiconductor devices were created. He was the first who proposed to use p-n-junctions as a nonlinear capacitors and that is widely used in parametric amplifiers. In 1962, together with others in the Soviet Union he made the first semiconductor laser (Lenin Prize, 1964).