Professor Richard Phillips
Professor of Physics
Fellow of Clare College
Director of Studies for Natural Sciences (Physical) Michaelmas 2011, Lent 2012
t: (01223) 337342
e: rtp1@cam.ac.uk
What are your particular research interests, and how did they arise?
I am an experimental physicist, and work mainly on the way electrons behave in semiconductors in their interactions with light. I ended up working in this area because I was interested in light and optics while at school, and developed an interest in gadgets which manipulated light. My present style of research owes a great deal to the stimulus provided by period of work in a very exciting research group in Germany in the 1980’s, which opened my eyes to ways of probing quantum effects in solids using optical methods. 
The graph shows a prediction made by my group recently for how a particular quantum system interacts with a complicated light pulse; the large “orange” area of the plot indicates that the system can be driven into an excited state in a way which is insensitive to the details of the system itself – this has advantages for some types of experiment (blues areas are where the system is left unexcited, and the ‘y’-axis describes the properties of the optical field).
The Photograph shows part of the apparatus which we have recently used to confirm the prediction.
What makes Clare a good place to study Natural Sciences?
Clearly, much of the teaching in Natural Sciences is based in the various University Departments, and all students experience the contact there in a similar way. The college does make a difference though in terms of the provision of supervisors, and the interest of the Fellows. In Clare we have a very friendly group of Fellows engaged in research across a wide spectrum of sciences, so there is a good chance that there will be someone around with expertise in your own area as you specialise in later years of the Tripos. They actually care about how well the students in Clare are getting on! I suppose you could say that the fact that the college has a friendly and unstuffy atmosphere makes it possible to interact closely with experienced people in a productive way for all concerned.
Selected recent publications
Wave-vector dependence of magnetic properties of excitons in ZnTe
LC Smith, JJ Davies, D Wolverson, H Boukari, H Mariette, VP Kochereshko, RT Phillips, Physical Review B83 155206
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.83.155206
Published: 18 April 2011
Population Inversion in a Single InGaAs Quantum Dot Using the Method of Adiabatic Rapid Passage
Yanwen Wu, IM Piper, M Ediger, P Brereton, ER Schmidgall, PR Eastham, M Hugues, M Hopkinson, RT Phillips,
Physical Review Letters 106 067401
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.067401
Published: 8 February 2011
Rashba spin-splitting of electrons in asymmetric quantum wells
PS Eldridge, WJH Leyland, PG Lagoudakis, RT Harley, RT Phillips, R Winkler, M Henini, D Taylor
Physical Review B82 045317
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.82.045317
Published: 26 July 2010
Population inversion in quantum dot ensembles via adiabatic rapid passage
ER Schmidgall, PR Eastham and RT Phillips
Physical Review B81 195306
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.81.195306
Published: 15 May 2010
Quantum condensation from a tailored exciton population in a microcavity
PR Eastham and RT Phillips
Physical Review B79 165303
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.79.165303
Published: April 2009
Moving nanoparticles with Raman scattering
M Ringler, TA Klar, A Schwemer, AS Susha, J Stehr, G Raschke, S Funk, M Borowski, A Nichtl, K Kuerzinger, RT Phillips and J Feldmann
Nano Letters 7 2753
DOI: 10.1021/nl0712466
Published: September 2007