Prof Chris Ford
Biography
Chris Ford completed his MA and PhD at the University of Cambridge, before working for a year at the IBM T J Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, USA, with Alan Fowler. He returned to Cambridge to a Research Fellowship at Girton College, and then became a lecturer at the Cavendish Laboratory. He is now Professor of Quantum Electronics in the Semiconductor Physics Group. His expertise includes device fabrication, electron-beam lithography, low-temperature measurement, surface acoustic waves, and the physics of electron transport in low-dimensional systems, particularly related to electron-electron interactions.
CV.
Research
Prof. Ford’s experimental group investigates the use of surface acoustic waves passing through narrow channels to move and process quantum bits (“qubits”) of information. He is currently working on the following topics, among others:
- generating and detecting single photons with Surface Acoustic Waves (SAWs)
- moving single-electron quantum dots carried by Surface Acoustic Waves (SAWs)
- the nonlinear extension of the Luttinger liquid and other interaction effects in 1D wires
- quantum transport and thermoelectricity in self-assembled monolayers of nanocrystals or designer molecules
In the past, Prof. Ford has also worked on, for example,
- mesoscopic effects in hole gases
- fractional quantum Hall effect, particularly edge states in the fractional quantum Hall regime
- 1D wires in undoped electron and hole gases
- the Aharonov-Bohm effect
- spin-related interactions in single quantum antidots
- Coulomb blockade in quantum dots
- the quenching of the Hall effect
