He served as a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey, where he headed the Optoelectronic Materials and Devices Research Group. He is now retired and holds the position of emeritus professor. He was awarded the Duddell Medal and Prize in 1995, and elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1996. In 2014 he was awarded the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics for his pioneering work on strained-layer laser structures.
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^ ab"ADAMS, Prof. Alfred Rodney". Who's Who 2014, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2014; online edn, Oxford University Press.(subscription required)
^O'Reilly, E. P.; Adams, A. R. (1994). "Band-structure engineering in strained semiconductor lasers". IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics. 30 (2): 366. Bibcode:1994IJQE...30..366O. doi:10.1109/3.283784.
^Adams, A. R.; Asada, M.; Suematsu, Y.; Arai, S. (1980). "The Temperature Dependence of the Efficiency and Threshold Current of In1-xGaxAsyP1-y Lasers Related to Intervalence Band Absorption". Japanese Journal of Applied Physics. 19 (10): L621. Bibcode:1980JaJAP..19L.621A. doi:10.1143/JJAP.19.L621. S2CID93124735.
^Fehse, R.; Tomic, S.; Adams, A. R.; Sweeney, S. J.; O'Reilly, E. P.; Andreev, A.; Riechert, H. (2002). "A quantitative study of radiative, Auger, and defect related recombination processes in 1.3-μm GaInNAs-based quantum-well lasers". IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics. 8 (4): 801. Bibcode:2002IJSTQ...8..801F. doi:10.1109/JSTQE.2002.801684.