Gerhard Abstreiter
from Walter Schottky Instituut Munchen gave a talk today in our nanoscience seminar. Gerhard Abstreiter is a name and a legend in a field that used to be optics of semiconductors and is called nanoscience now. He is one of few scientists in our big field who can compete with me in beard length.
He started his talk by describing the buildings of Walter Schottky Instituut: one may find it strange if not feeling the affiliation of the speaker with the place and his personal involvement with the materialization of these buildings. He gave a short overview of the research in his group, nuclear-spin engineering of SiGe heterostuctures and hand-made photon crystals being the things that impressed be most.
The main topic was optical spin control in self-assembled InAs quantum dots. Gerhard made introduction with his own pioneering works in optical control of a single dot made in early nineties. Later he elaborated on spin-to-charge conversion by adding a polarized exciton. Last part of his talk was about dynamical nuclear polarization that me and Jeroen Danon were busy several years ago. The results reported have not been obvious, I still have to think about.
