Welcome 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 astonising atom-like phenomenon in a complex condensed matter system. This has opened up the possibility of using such semicondcutors 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 oppurtunities in the group, feel free to contact any of the Graduate students or Prof Steel himself.

 

Latest News

• 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 Standford.
• 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.
• A talk titled "Coherent Population Trapping of an Electron Spin in a Singly Negatively Charged Quantum Dot", was presented by Bo Sun at CLEO 2009
• A talk titled "Coherent Ultrafast Optical Control of an Electron Spin Initialized to a Pure State in a Charged Self-Assembled Quantum Dot", was presented by Erk Kim at CLEO 2009.
• A talk titled "Optically Controlled Locking of the Nuclear Field via Coherent Dark State Spectroscopy", was presented by Bo Sun at CLEO 2009.