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- Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics
Don Ellis {Ellis Research Group}
Professor Ellis' group studies the electronic structure and related materials properties of ceramics, polymers, alloys, molecular assemblies, and nanostructures. A hybrid classical/quantum mechanical approach is used to explore transport, spectra, energetics, electrical and magnetic response. Recent developments include an order(N) linear-scaling method for treating extended systems with low symmetry, using parallel-computational algorithms.
Arthur Freeman
Professor Freeman's research centers on the numerical calculation of the properties of materials. His research group has developed a method of calculating magneto-optical effects in solids and surfaces and has developed a new approach for determining magneto-crystalline anisotropy. Other materials that his group has investigated include high-Tc superconductors, magnetic overlayers and multilayers, and semiconductor heterostructures.
Anupam Garg
Professor Garg's research interests are currently in macroscopic quantum phenomena in magnetic systems. One goal is to see the tunneling of the macroscopic moment of small magnetic particles. Garg has also become interested in quantum computers, which exploit the quantal superposition principle to achieve massive parallelism.
James A. Sauls
James Sauls' research is directed towards theoretically understanding strongly interacting systems of particles, including superconductors, quantum fluids, and newly discovered "strongly correlated electronic materials". His work covers a broad range of topics, including the theory of broken symmetry in quantum fluids, transport in heavy-electron superconductors, superfluidity in
3He films, and dense matter inside neutron stars.
Horace Yuen
Professor Yuen works in the areas of quantum optics and quantum measurement theory, quantum information and quantum communications, as well as the foundations of quantum physics. Recently, he has been focusing on reliable physical computation and secure communications, and particularly novel physical schemes, both quantum and classical, for efficient computation and absolutely secure cryptographic operations.
- Experimental Condensed Matter Physics
Michael Bedzyk
{Bedzyk Research Page}
Professor Bedzyk's research centers on the development of X-ray synchrotron-radiation techniques to pin-point the atomic-scale lattice location of atoms at vacuum-, gas-, fluid-, and crystal-crystalline interfaces. He is currently studying MBE-grown atomic monolayers on semiconductor and complex oxide surfaces; semiconductor and ferroelectric thin-film epitaxy; and the water/mineral interface.
Hui Cao
{Cao Research Page}
Professor Cao's research focuses on microcavity quantum electrodynamics, and photon localization in random media. She is utilizing microcavities to control linear and nonlinear optical processes. Professor Cao's other research interest is the generation of coherent light in active random media.
Venkat Chandrasekhar
{Mesoscopic Research Group}
Professor Chandrasekhar's interest is in the area of mesoscopic physics, or the physics that occurs in materials at sub-micrometer length scales. His current interests include investigating the superconducting proximity effect in mesoscopic superconducting/normal-metal devices, and the magnetic and electrical properties of devices which incorporate small ferromagnetic particles.
Pulak Dutta
{Dutta Research Page}
Professor Dutta's research is concerned with ordering and phase transitions in soft condensed materials at surfaces and interfaces. For example, his group performs in-situ X-ray scattering studies of physisorbed and chemisorbed molecular monolayers and multilayers, many of which form mesophases that are neither solid nor liquid. They also study liquids in the vicinity of solid-liquid interfaces, where these become 'solid-like'.
William Halperin
{Ultra-Low Temperature Group}
{NMR Laboratory}
Professor Halperin's research is in quantum fluids and solids, including unconventional superconductors, molecular transport in porous media, and ion-conducting electrolytes. His group uses nuclear magnetic resonance techniques, ultrasound, and thermodynamic methods to investigate high-temperature superconductors, heavy-fermion superconductors, and the superfluid phases of helium three. Measurements are made under extreme conditions of temperatures as low as 0.0004 K, and magnetic fields as high as 30 T.
John Ketterson
Professor Ketterson is currently engaged in high-field and ultra-low temperature studies of heavy-fermion compounds; thermoelectric and thermionic thin-film materials and devices; coherent exciton phenomena in cuprous oxide; magnetic, superconducting and nonlinear optical properties of patterned nanostructures; and photonic and superconducting devices. Ketterson is also Director of the Magnetic and Physical Properties Measurement Facility, a non-profit laboratory that provides highly accurate measurements of magnetization, magnetic susceptibility, microwave absorption, thermal transport, and other properties to researchers in physics, chemistry, biology, materials science, and geology.
Prem Kumar
Professor Kumar is Director of Northwestern's Center for Photonic Communication and Computing. His research is on the development of novel fiber-optic devices for ultrahigh-speed optical communication networks. He is also interested in nonlinear optics, quantum cryptography, data processing using nonlinear fiber optics and advanced optical networking, and squeezed light.
- Complex Systems and Biological Physics
John F. Marko
{Marko Laboratory Page}
Professor Marko's research is focused on the question of how DNA is organized and processed inside cells. His group carries out single-DNA stretching experiments to study protein-DNA interactions and chromatin structure, as well as experiments on living cells to directly study whole chromosomes. Prof. Marko's group also uses statistical mechanics to study problems in molecular biophysics.
Adilson E. Motter
{Motter Research Page}
Professor Motter's research is focused on complex systems and nonlinear phenomena, primarily in the realm of chaos, fractals, statistical physics, complex networks, and biological physics. Current projects include whole-cell modeling of cellular metabolism, system-level approach to cascading failures in infrastructure networks, synchronization and other dynamical phenomena in complex networks, advection dynamics in chaotic fluid flows, and foundations of chaos in classical and relativistic systems.
Sara Solla
Sara Solla's research interests lie in the application of statistical mechanics to the analysis of complex systems. Her research has led her to the study of neural networks, which are theoretical models that incorporate "fuzzy logic" and are thought to be in some aspects analogous to the way the human brain stores and processes information. She has used spin-glass models (originally developed to explain magnetism in amorphous materials) to describe associative memory, worked on a statistical description of supervised learning, investigated the emergence of generalization abilities in adaptive systems, and studied the dynamics of incremental learning algorithms. Solla has also helped develop constrained neural networks for pattern-recognition tasks, along with descriptions of the computational capabilities of neural networks and learning algorithms for the design of neural network controllers. She plans to establish an interdisciplinary research program at Northwestern that will focus on sensory processing, motor control, neuronal encoding, and learning in neural networks.
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