[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]

 			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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