Pierre Petroff

Professor

Materials, Electrical and Computer Engineering

805-893-8256

petroff [at] engineering [dot] ucsb [dot] edu

Institute Role
Member of Lighting Solutions Group

Role in Affiliated Centers
Member of the Interdisciplinary Center for Wide Bandgap Semiconductors and the Solid-State Lighting & Energy Center

Research
Pierre Petroff 's research is in the field of self-assembled nanostructures using molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). His most recent work focuses on the electronic properties of novel hybrid materials, quantum wires, and quantum boxes. In the last ten years, Petroff has contributed pioneering work on the growth of self assembling and self ordering of quantum wires and quantum dots in compounds semiconductors. Through photoluminescence, magneto transport and infrared spectroscopy studies, he has shown the “atom-like” character of the quantum dots energy spectrum for both electrons and holes. Recently he has focused on the electronic structure of coupled quantum dots and on the coupling of quantum dots to microcavities and photonic crystals. Petroff has been working on several applications of quantum dots to devices, including ultra low threshold quantum dots photonic crystal lasers and ultra bright single photons sources.

Biography
After completing his undergraduate degree in his native France, Pierre Petroff received M.S. and Ph.D degrees in Materials Science from UC Berkeley and was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Materials Science Department at Cornell University. Prior to joining UCSB in 1986, Petroff worked for 15 years at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He currently has a dual appointment at UCSB as Professor of Materials and Electrical and Computer Engineering. Petroff is the recipient of numerous awards including a Fulbright Grant (1963), a Distinguished Technical Staff Award from AT&T Bell Laboratories (1986), a Humboldt Research Award (1993), a Lady Davies Senior Research Fellowship Award (1996) and an ISCS Quantum Devices Award (2005). He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1989) and the Institute of Physics (2004). Petroff has been granted 12 patents and has authored or co-authored over 350 publications.