[Crib-list] SPEAKER: Mark Rudner (MIT) -- COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH IN BOSTON SEMINAR - Friday, December 7, 2007 -- LOCATION: Room 32-124 -- TIME: 12:30 PM

[Shirley Entzminger]

T O D A Y...

 			COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON SEMINAR


Date:		FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2007
Time:		12:30 PM
Location:	Building 32, Room 124 (Stata Center)

(Pizza and beverages will be provided at 12:15 PM outside Room 32-124.)


Title:		SOLID STATE PHYSICS AT THE NANOSCALE:
 		THE DEMISE OF MOORE'S LAW AND THE RISE OF
 		QUANTUM ELECTRONICS


Speaker:	MARK RUDNER (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)


ABSTRACT:

Over the past 50 years, the continual miniaturization of semiconducting 
structures comprising electronic circuits resulted in a rapid increase of 
computational power with very few fundamental changes in component design. 
However, we are quickly reaching a limit where the current production designs 
of transistors and logic gates will no longer be able to scale down to smaller 
sizes without serious changes in performance due to quantum effects such as 
tunneling and interference.  To facilitate the further development of 
information processing technologies, we must now find new ways of storing and 
manipulating information in "mesoscopic systems," where both classical and 
quantum mechanical behaviors can arise.

In the first part of this talk I will introduce the basic physics of the Field 
Effect Transistor (FET) and describe the onset of quantum effects as such 
devices are miniaturized down to the mesoscale.  Although such quantum effects 
are considered to be a nuisance to CMOS chip designers, many useful solid-state 
devices based on quantum mechanical principles can now be fabricated and 
studied.  To illustrate this point, in the second part of this talk I will 
describe the interesting coupled dynamics of electron and nuclear spins that 
arises due to DC transport through quantum dots in the so-called spin blockade 
regime.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA  02139


http://www-math.mit.edu/crib

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