Armando Rastelli

Armando Rastelli (* 1974 in Fermo ) is an Italian physicist and university professor. He is professor of semiconductor physics at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz and heads both the semiconductor physics department and the institute for semiconductor and solid state physics.

Life

He studied physics at the Università degli studi di Camerino and Bologna and received his “Laurea” in physics in 1998 with a thesis on the inelastic collision of high-energy muons of cosmic rays at the Gran Sasso . After his community service in Smerillo , he switched to semiconductor physics and did research at the Università degli studi di Pavia and at the Swiss Federal University of Zurich (ETH) . There he dealt with the epitaxial growth of silicon-germanium nanostructures using ultra-high vacuum sputtering epitaxy and their investigation using scanning tunneling microscopy. During his doctorate, he also spent three months at the Optoelectronic Research Center (ORC) of the TU Tampere as an Undergraduate Marie Fellow and four months at the L-NESS in Como. Armando Rastelli received his doctorate in Pavia in 2003 with a thesis on the morphological evolution of Si-Ge nano-islands on silicon substrates. Afterwards he was a postdoc and then group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart (2003–2007) and department head at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research (IFW) Dresden (2007–2012). He has been at the JKU since June 2012.

In 2019 Rastelli was accepted as a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences .

Rastelli is married and has twins.

Main focus of work and research

Research focuses on the one hand on the production, using molecular beam epitaxy , of novel semiconductor nanostructures (mainly quantum dots) based on GaAs and the control of their optical and electronic properties by means of external fields, and on the other hand, the investigation of the thermoelectric properties of semiconductor thin films. The aim of the first focus is the realization of semiconductor components for use in quantum optics and possibly in the field of quantum communication . The latter is about the development and detailed characterization of model systems to understand the effects of nanostructuring with regard to thermoelectric transport in semiconductors. The aim is to develop materials with increased conversion efficiency for the direct conversion of heat into electrical energy and vice versa.

Web links

• Armando Rastelli on the Johannes Kepler University website
• Publications by Rastelli