Controlled epitaxial growth of semiconductor A on B is at the core of the vast majority of semiconductor electronic and photonic nanoscale devices and the system architectures they end up dictating. Much of the underpinning conceptual framework and operational descriptions of epitaxy invoke, implicitly or explicitly, behavior associated with the thermodynamic ground state of a closed system of atoms, typically without demonstrable evidence. Indeed, to the contrary, much of the existence of such systems is itself evidence for their metastability-- arising from the operational competing atomistic kinetics of a changing set of multiple stochastic processes-- controlling the nature of local atomic spatial arrangement of an open system on a length scale that itself is the outcome of a time scale resulting from the locally competing kinetics. In this talk I will emphasize this typically overlooked essence of epitaxy and connect its consequences for the formation of epitaxial quantum dots in lattice matched and mismatched semiconductor systems, the resulting fluctuations in their electronic states, and their potential for exploitation as single photon sources for on-chip integrated quantum optical circuits.

Bio：

B.S.   University of Lucknow,  India
M.S.   Physics,  Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur), India
Ph.D.  Materials Science and Physics, California Institute of Technology

Anupam Madhukar heads the Nanostructure Materials & Devices Lab and carries out multi-disciplinary research with a focus on the synthesis and study of quantum nanostructures aimed at electronic, optoelectronic, & photonic systems for information sensing, processing , and communication down to single photon level.