Michael Pepper

Sir Michael Pepper (born August 10, 1942 ) is a British solid-state physicist, known for work on nanostructures in semiconductors and as a pioneer in the study of solid-state electron systems in low (two or less) dimensions and their quantum phenomena.

Pepper studied physics at the University of Reading with a bachelor's degree in 1963 and a PhD in 1967. He then went into industrial research on semiconductors at the Caswell Research Laboratory of the electronics company Plessey . From 1973 his research began at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University , where he stayed until 2008. There he worked for a long time with the theorist and Nobel Prize winner Nevill Mott on localization phenomena in semiconductors. In 1985 he took over the leadership of the semiconductor research group and in 1987 he became a professor. At the same time he worked for industry, until 1982 for Plessey and then for General Electric Company (GEC) at the GEC Hirst Research Center and in joint projects between GEC and the University of Cambridge. In 1991 he became Managing Director of the newly established Toshiba Cambridge Research Center (now the Cambridge Research Laboratories of Toshiba Europe, CRL) and in 2007 he became a Senior Adviser to Toshiba. In 2009 he became Pender Professor of Nanoelectronics at the London Center for Nanotechnology at University College London .

He deals with nanostructures in semiconductors, quantum transport, localization and metal-insulator transitions, properties of strongly interacting electron gases in solids, Bose-Einstein condensation in the solid phase, hybrid magnet-semiconductor structures and physical applications in medicine and biology.

In 1980, Pepper was one of the co-authors of Klaus von Klitzing's original article on the quantum hall effect .

Pepper developed an electrostatic method to restrict two-dimensional electron gas systems to zero or one dimension, using it to study various quantum phenomena such as the quantization of the conductivity of ballistic electrons in one dimension.

In 2001 he co-founded TeraView and was its scientific director. The company serves the commercial application of terahertz research at the CRL.

In 1985 he received the Faraday Medal of the Institute of Physics (then Guthrie Medal) and the European Physics Prize (European Physical Society). In 1983 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society , receiving the Hughes Medal in 1987 and the Royal Medal in 2005. In 2004 he gave the Royal Society's Bakerian Lecture. In 2000 he received the first Mott Prize from the Institute of Physics , of which he is a fellow. In 1982 he became a Fellow of Trinity College , Cambridge and received a Master of Arts degree from Cambridge University in 1987 and an honorary doctorate (D. Sc.) In 1989. 2006 Pepper was knighted as a Knight Bachelor . In 2009 he became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering . He has been a member of the Academia Europaea since 2012 . In 2013, Pepper was again awarded a Faraday Medal ; this time that of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). Also in 2013 he received the Dirac Medal and an honorary doctorate from the University of New South Wales . For 2019, Pepper was awarded the Isaac Newton Medal .

Web links

• Biography at nanowerk 2009
• Website at UCL

Individual evidence

1. ↑ von Klitzing, Gerhard Dorda , M. Pepper New Method for High-Accuracy Determination of the Fine-Structure Constant Based on Quantized Hall Resistance , Phys. Rev. Letters, Volume 45, 1980, pp. 494-497.