Tony Heinz

Last updated
Tony Frederick Heinz
Born(1956-04-30)April 30, 1956
NationalityAmerican
Known for Nanoscience, two-dimensional materials, laser physics
Scientific career
InstitutionsStanford University, Columbia University, IBM - Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Thesis Nonlinear optics of surfaces and absorbates  (1982)
Website Stanford profile

Tony Frederick Heinz (born 30 April 1956 in Palo Alto) is an American physicist. [1]

Contents

Biography

Heinz studied at Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1978. He received his doctorate in 1982 at the University of California, Berkeley, in physics. [2] From 1983 to 1995 he was at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center of IBM. He was a professor at Columbia University and is now a professor at Stanford University. He served as president of The Optical Society in 2021. [3]

Research

His research focuses on ultrafast laser spectroscopy (femtosecond pulses) and thus investigates dynamics at surfaces. His group investigates electronic and optical properties of a few atoms of thin two-dimensional systems (such as graphene or ultrathin crystals of transition-metal di-chalcogen compounds).

Heinz is one of the most cited scientists. Since 2019, the media group Clarivate counts him among the favorites for a Nobel Prize (Clarivate Citation Laureates). [4]

Awards and honors

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

Photocurrent is the electric current through a photosensitive device, such as a photodiode, as the result of exposure to radiant power. The photocurrent may occur as a result of the photoelectric, photoemissive, or photovoltaic effect. The photocurrent may be enhanced by internal gain caused by interaction among ions and photons under the influence of applied fields, such as occurs in an avalanche photodiode (APD).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Plasmon</span> Quasiparticle of charge oscillations in condensed matter

In physics, a plasmon is a quantum of plasma oscillation. Just as light consists of photons, the plasma oscillation consists of plasmons. The plasmon can be considered as a quasiparticle since it arises from the quantization of plasma oscillations, just like phonons are quantizations of mechanical vibrations. Thus, plasmons are collective oscillations of the free electron gas density. For example, at optical frequencies, plasmons can couple with a photon to create another quasiparticle called a plasmon polariton.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Molybdenum disulfide</span> Chemical compound

Molybdenum disulfide is an inorganic compound composed of molybdenum and sulfur. Its chemical formula is MoS
2
.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Molybdenite</span> Molybdenum disulfide mineral

Molybdenite is a mineral of molybdenum disulfide, MoS2. Similar in appearance and feel to graphite, molybdenite has a lubricating effect that is a consequence of its layered structure. The atomic structure consists of a sheet of molybdenum atoms sandwiched between sheets of sulfur atoms. The Mo-S bonds are strong, but the interaction between the sulfur atoms at the top and bottom of separate sandwich-like tri-layers is weak, resulting in easy slippage as well as cleavage planes. Molybdenite crystallizes in the hexagonal crystal system as the common polytype 2H and also in the trigonal system as the 3R polytype.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graphene</span> Hexagonal lattice made of carbon atoms

Graphene is an allotrope of carbon consisting of a single layer of atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice nanostructure. The name is derived from "graphite" and the suffix -ene, reflecting the fact that the graphite allotrope of carbon contains numerous double bonds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tungsten ditelluride</span> Chemical compound

Tungsten(IV) telluride (WTe2) is an inorganic semimetallic chemical compound. In October 2014, tungsten ditelluride was discovered to exhibit an extremely large magnetoresistance: 13 million percent resistance increase in a magnetic field of 60 Tesla at 0.5 Kelvin. The resistance is proportional to the square of the magnetic field and shows no saturation. This may be due to the material being the first example of a compensated semimetal, in which the number of mobile holes is the same as the number of electrons. Tungsten ditelluride has layered structure, similar to many other transition metal dichalcogenides, but its layers are so distorted that the honeycomb lattice many of them have in common is in WTe2 hard to recognize. The tungsten atoms instead form zigzag chains, which are thought to behave as one-dimensional conductors. Unlike electrons in other two-dimensional semiconductors, the electrons in WTe2 can easily move between the layers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graphene nanoribbon</span> Carbon allotrope

Graphene nanoribbons are strips of graphene with width less than 100 nm. Graphene ribbons were introduced as a theoretical model by Mitsutaka Fujita and coauthors to examine the edge and nanoscale size effect in graphene.

Pomeranchuk cooling is the phenomenon in which liquid helium-3 will cool if it is compressed isentropically when it is below 0.3 K. This occurs because helium-3 has the unusual property that its solid state can have a higher entropy than its liquid state. The effect was first observed by Yuri Anufriev in 1965. This can be used to construct a cryogenic cooler.

A trion is a localized excitation which consists of three charged particles. A negative trion consists of two electrons and one hole and a positive trion consists of two holes and one electron. The trion itself is a quasiparticle and is somewhat similar to an exciton, which is a complex of one electron and one hole. The trion has a ground singlet state (spin S = 1/2) and an excited triplet state (S = 3/2). Here singlet and triplet degeneracies originate not from the whole system but from the two identical particles in it. The half-integer spin value distinguishes trions from excitons in many phenomena; for example, energy states of trions, but not excitons, are split in an applied magnetic field. Trion states were predicted theoretically in 1958; they were observed experimentally in 1993 in CdTe/Cd1−xZnxTe quantum wells, and later in various other optically excited semiconductor structures. There are experimental proofs of their existence in nanotubes supported by theoretical studies. Despite numerous reports of experimental trion observations in different semiconductor heterostructures, there are serious concerns on the exact physical nature of the detected complexes. The originally foreseen 'true' trion particle has a delocalized wavefunction (at least at the scales of several Bohr radii) while recent studies reveal significant binding from charged impurities in real semiconductor quantum wells.

Bilayer graphene is a material consisting of two layers of graphene. One of the first reports of bilayer graphene was in the seminal 2004 Science paper by Geim and colleagues, in which they described devices "which contained just one, two, or three atomic layers"

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tungsten diselenide</span> Chemical compound

Tungsten diselenide is an inorganic compound with the formula WSe2. The compound adopts a hexagonal crystalline structure similar to molybdenum disulfide. The tungsten atoms are covalently bonded to six selenium ligands in a trigonal prismatic coordination sphere while each selenium is bonded to three tungsten atoms in a pyramidal geometry. The tungsten–selenium bond has a length of 0.2526 nm, and the distance between selenium atoms is 0.334 nm. It is a well studied example of a layered material. The layers stack together via van der Waals interactions. WSe2 is a very stable semiconductor in the group-VI transition metal dichalcogenides.

Valleytronics is an experimental area in semiconductors that exploits local extrema ("valleys") in the electronic band structure. Certain semiconductors have multiple "valleys" in the electronic band structure of the first Brillouin zone, and are known as multivalley semiconductors. Valleytronics is the technology of control over the valley degree of freedom, a local maximum/minimum on the valence/conduction band, of such multivalley semiconductors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers</span> Thin semiconductors

Transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMD or TMDC) monolayers are atomically thin semiconductors of the type MX2, with M a transition-metal atom (Mo, W, etc.) and X a chalcogen atom (S, Se, or Te). One layer of M atoms is sandwiched between two layers of X atoms. They are part of the large family of so-called 2D materials, named so to emphasize their extraordinary thinness. For example, a MoS2 monolayer is only 6.5 Å thick. The key feature of these materials is the interaction of large atoms in the 2D structure as compared with first-row transition-metal dichalcogenides, e.g., WTe2 exhibits anomalous giant magnetoresistance and superconductivity.

In materials science, the term single-layer materials or 2D materials refers to crystalline solids consisting of a single layer of atoms. These materials are promising for some applications but remain the focus of research. Single-layer materials derived from single elements generally carry the -ene suffix in their names, e.g. graphene. Single-layer materials that are compounds of two or more elements have -ane or -ide suffixes. 2D materials can generally be categorized as either 2D allotropes of various elements or as compounds.

A two-dimensional semiconductor is a type of natural semiconductor with thicknesses on the atomic scale. Geim and Novoselov et al. initiated the field in 2004 when they reported a new semiconducting material graphene, a flat monolayer of carbon atoms arranged in a 2D honeycomb lattice. A 2D monolayer semiconductor is significant because it exhibits stronger piezoelectric coupling than traditionally employed bulk forms. This coupling could enable applications. One research focus is on designing nanoelectronic components by the use of graphene as electrical conductor, hexagonal boron nitride as electrical insulator, and a transition metal dichalcogenide as semiconductor.

A rapidly increasing list of graphene production techniques have been developed to enable graphene's use in commercial applications.

Graphene is a 2D nanosheet with atomic thin thickness in terms of 0.34 nm. Due to the ultrathin thickness, graphene showed many properties that are quite different from their bulk graphite counterparts. The most prominent advantages are known to be their high electron mobility and high mechanical strengths. Thus, it exhibits potential for applications in optics and electronics especially for the development of wearable devices as flexible substrates. More importantly, the optical absorption rate of graphene is 2.3% in the visible and near-infrared region. This broadband absorption characteristic also attracted great attention of the research community to exploit the graphene-based photodetectors/modulators.

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero is a Spanish physicist and current Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aleksandra Radenovic</span> Swiss-Croatian bioengineer

Aleksandra Radenovic is a Swiss and Croatian biophysicist. Her research focuses on the development of experimental tools to study single-molecule biophysics. She is a professor of biological engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and head of the Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology.

Jie Shan is a Chinese-American scientist who is Professor of Physics and Head of Graduate Studies at Cornell University. Her research considers the advanced characterization of two dimensional materials. She was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013.

References

  1. American Men and Women of Science. Thomson Gale. 2004.
  2. Heinz, Tony (1982). Nonlinear optics of surfaces and absorbates (Thesis). OCLC   729538318 . Retrieved 2022-08-12.
  3. 1 2 "Biographies: Tony F. Heinz". The Optical Society.
  4. "The 2019 Clarivate Citation Laureates" (PDF). Clarivate Analytics. We recognize Heinz for contributions to understanding classes of nanoscale materials including carbon nanotubes, graphene, and two-dimensional semiconductors such as molybdenum disulfide.
  5. "William F. Meggers Award". The Optical Society.
  6. "Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics". springer.com. Retrieved 2019-12-04.