Research

Professor Michael Flatté's research investigates the optical and electrical control of electron, ionic, and nuclear spins in materials, novel "spintronic" devices, quantum sensors, and solid-state realizations of quantum computation.

His group explores the electronic, magnetic and optical properties of complex natural and artificial materials. These studies range from the atomic-scale modification of a host by a single defect atom to the stability of macroscopic coherent phenomena such as spin waves. He has developed a range of computational approaches to these calculations, and applied them to predict the local electronic and magnetic properties of defects and dopants in semiconducting materials, the novel behavior of electronic and spin excitations in artificial structures, and the evolution of entanglement in hybrid quantum coherent systems. His predictions have been verified by measurements of atomic-scale tunneling (nanoscale devices and scanning tunneling spectroscopy), ultrafast optical probes of spin coherence and spin-dependent recombination, as well as via novel device performance.

As spin provides a robust high-temperature realization of quantum coherence these predictions have led Prof. Flatté to propose several new classes of spintronic devices, including spin transistors, spin-based teleportation protocols, single-photon detectors and organic light emitters, leading to 10 patents. He continues to explore the application of spin to quantum information, including for room-temperature quantum sensors and high-speed scalable manipulation of quantum information. The computational codes he and his group have developed have been licensed by external users.

Biography

Professor Flatté received an AB degree in physics from Harvard University in 1988 and a PhD degree in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1992. After postdoctoral work at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB and in the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University, he joined the faculty at UI in 1995. He was director of UI’s Optical Science and Technology Center from 2010 to 2017. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Physical Society (APS), and was chair of the Division of Materials Physics of APS from 2016 to 2017. In 2019 he developed the first course on Quantum Engineering for the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. Prof. Flatté also has a courtesy appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Iowa as well as an adjunct appointment as professor in the Department of Applied Physics at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.