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March 10, 2005
Nobel Laureate Dr. Horst Stormer - Small Wonders: The World of Nano Science
The MIT Club of the Delaware Valley
and
The Columbia University Club of Philadelphia
Small Wonders: The World of Nano Science
WHEN: Thursday, March 10th, 6 p.m. (lecture starts at 7 p.m. follow an hors d’oeurves reception)
WHERE: Law Offices of Schnader Harrison Segal and Lewis LLP, Suite 3600, 1600 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103.
COST: $20 for Club Members and guests, $25 for non-members
RSVP: Internet or by sending a check to Dr. William Reenstra before March 8th, 2005.
CONTACT: Bill Reenstra, at 200 Garden Pl., Radnor, PA 19087.
During the last 50 years there have been unprecedented advances in electronics. Miniaturization of electronic components has been the driving force for this progress and the physics of solid state materials has provided the scientific foundation for these advances. Our speaker Dr. Horst Stromer has been at the forefront of these advances. He has discovered and continues to discover much of the underlying physics that allows these advances to be made. In his lecture Dr. Stromer will describe some of the fascinating and unexpected aspects of this world that make today’s world possible.
Horst Stormer was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Stuttgart in 1977. In that year he became a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. Dr. Stormer became a Member of Technical Staff in 1978, headed the Semiconductor Physics Research Department from 1983 to 1992, and was the Director of the Physical Research Laboratory from 1992 to 1997. In 1997 Dr. Stromer became a Professor of Physics at Columbia University. Professor Stormer is also scientific director of Columbia’s Center for Electron Transport in Molecular Nanostructures, one of six Nano Science and Engineering Centers funded by the National Science Foundation.
Professor Stormer has worked extensively on the properties of two-dimensional electron sheets in semiconductors and published more than 200 papers on this and on related subjects. In 1978 Stormer co-invented a technique that "speeds up" electrons in semiconductors. The world's fastest and quietest transistors are based on this principle. In 1982 Dr. Stromer and his colleagues Daniel Tsui and Robert Laughlin demonstrated that at very low temperatures and in high magnetic fields, electrons seem to fall apart and form particles with 1/3 the charge of an electron. This is only observed when a "community of many electrons" is present and never observed with isolated electrons. As such it is a wonderful demonstration that the whole can be more than the sum of the parts. Professor Stormer and his colleagues have received numerous awards for their discovery, the most prestigious being the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Posted by webmaster at March 10, 2005 06:00 PM
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