Prof Duncan SteelWelcome to our group homepage! The group is headed by Prof Duncan Steel, the Robert J Hiller Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who also holds a joint apointment in the Physics department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is also a Research Professor in Biophysics where he runs the Protein Folding and Stability Research Lab.

Research in the group focuses on the use of coherent optical interactions to study, control, and manipulate the quantum properties of semiconductor heterostructures. Over the past few years, the group has been able to demonstrate astonishing atom-like phenomena in a complex condensed matter system. This has opened up the possibility of using such semiconductor heterostructures in schemes of making a scalable quantum computer. Recently we have also begun work on doing spectroscopy using special light beams which carry orbital angular momentum. We encourage you to explore our projects by by clicking on the links above. For any technical questions or inquiries about opportunities in the group, feel free to contact any of the Graduate students or Prof Steel himself.

 

Check out our research here:

 

Latest News

2015

  • August 2015:
         Colin Chow gave an invited talk titled "Coherent Optical Control of the Electron and Nuclear Spin in a Quantum Dot Molecule" at the FOPS 2015 Meeting in Breckenridge, Colorado.
         Aaron Ross presented a poster titled "Efforts towards a Universal Two-Qubit Gate in Self-Assembled InAs Quantum Dot Molecules" at the FOPS 2015 Meeting in Breckenridge, Colorado.
         Congratulations to Alex Burgers on defending his thesis!
  • May 2015:
         Congratulations to Colin Chow on defending his thesis!
  • March 2015:
         Alex Burgers gave an invited talk titled "Coherent Optical Control of Quantum Dots: Spin Qubits and Flying Qubits" at the APS March Meeting 2015.
          Colin Chow gave a talk titled "Nuclear Spin Locking and Extended Two-Electron Spin Decoherence Time in an InAs Quantum Dot Molecule" at the APS March Meeting 2015.
          Aaron Ross gave a talk titled "Ground state initialization in a doubly-charged, vertically-stacked InAs Quantum Dot Molecule" at the APS March Meeting 2015.
          Cameron Nelson gave a talk titled "Shedding Light on the Emission Mechanisms of In0.54Ga0.46N Disks in GaN Nanowires Using C.W. Non-Linear Spectroscopy" at the APS March Meeting 2015.

2013

  • October 2013:
         Alex Burgers gave a talk titled "Demonstration of Entanglement between a photon and a Quantum Dot" at DLS 2013.
         Colin Chow gave a talk titled "Proposal for a Universal Two-Qubit Quantum Gate in Self-Assembled InAs/GaAs Quantum Dot Molecules with Intensity-Modulated CW Laser" at DLS 2013.
  • August 2013:
         John Schaibley gave a talk titled "Spin-Photon Entanglement and Optical Control of Quantum Dots: Steps toward Quantum Information Processing" at FOPS 2013.
         Colin Chow presented a poster titled "Proposal for an All-Optical Universal Two-Qubit Quantum Gate in Doubly-Charged Self-Assembled InAs/GaAs Quantum Dot Molecule" at FOPS 2013.
  • July 2013: Congratulations to John Schaibley for defending his thesis!
  • June 2013:
         John Schaibley gave a talk titled "Entanglement Between a Quantum Dot Spin and a Photon" at CLEO 2013.
         Alex Burgers gave a talk titled "Direct Detection of Optical Rabi Oscillations from a Single Quantum Dot" at CLEO 2013.

2012

  • July 2012: Congratulations to Vasudev Lal for defending his thesis!
  • June 2012: Congratulations to Leon Webster for defending his thesis!
  • May 2012: Bo Sun and Duncan Steel gave talks at the 2012 Michigan Quantum Summer School on nuclear spins in singly charged quantum dots.

2010

  • March 2010:
         Katherine Truex gave a talk titled “Optical Control via Geometric Phases of an Electron Spin in a Single Self-Assembled Quantum Dot” at the APS March meeting.

2009

  • Nov 2009:
         Katherine Truex gave an invited talk titled “Fast Coherent Optical Manipulation of Quantum Dots” at the MRS meeting in Boston.
  • July 2009: Congratulations to Erik for successfully defending his thesis! His thesis can be found here. He now has a post-doctoral position in Jelena Vuckovic's group at Stanford.
  • A paper titled "Optically controlled locking of the nuclear field via coherent dark-state spectroscopy" has been published in Nature.
  • We have put up a paper titled "All-Optical Ultrafast Control and Read-Out of a Single Negatively Charged Self-Assembled InAs Quantum Dot" up on the arXiv.
  • June 2009:
         Erik Kim gave a talk titled "Coherent Ultrafast Optical Control of an Electron Spin Initialized to a Pure State in a Charged Self-Assembled Quantum Dot" at CLEO 2009.
         Bo Sun gave a talk titled "Optically Controlled Locking of the Nuclear Field via Coherent Dark State Spectroscopy" at CLEO 2009.
         Bo Sun gave a talk titled "Coherent Population Trapping of an Electron Spin in a Singly Negatively Charged Quantum Dot" at CLEO 2009.