Douglas Natelson is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy,
with a courtesy appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering, at Rice University.
He earned his BSE in 1993 from Princeton University, a PhD in physics from Stanford
University in 1998, and was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at Bell
Laboratories, Lucent Technologies from 1998-2000. At Rice he has established a
research program with an emphasis on using nanostructures as tools to examine the
electronic, magnetic, and optical properties of materials at scales approaching that of
single atoms. This includes work on molecular-scale junctions, organic semiconductor
devices, and nanostructures incorporating strongly correlated materials. Over the years
he has been awarded the Goldwater Scholarship, the Hertz graduate fellowship, a Sloan
Fellowship, a David and Lucille Packard fellowship, and a NSF CAREER award. He is
director of the Applied Physics graduate program at Rice, and co-director of Rice’s W.
M. Keck Program in Quantum Materials.
Presentation title and abstract:
Nanometer scale devices as tools for examining physics and physical chemistry
In our laboratory we use nanoscale fabrication techniques to make electronic devices with
active regions well below 100 nm in extent. Using these systems we have been able to
examine physical and chemical processes in a tunable manner, revealing some new and
sometimes surprising phenomena. One major research direction has focused on singlemolecule electronic and optical measurements. We have studied strong electronic
correlations in single-molecule junctions via the Kondo effect and its impact on
electronic transport. We have also examined inelastic processes in single-molecule
junctions involving molecular vibrations. Most recently we have developed the
capability to perform simultaneous single-molecule conduction and surface-enhanced
Raman spectroscopy measurements. This opens the possibility of studying dissipative
processes at the single-molecule level and also has significant implications for chemical
sensing applications. Another recent research direction involves the fabrication of
nanostructures based directly on materials with intrinsic strong electronic correlations. I
will describe measurements in nanostructures based on magnetite (Fe3O4), an archetypal
correlated transition metal oxide with electronic properties that have been controversial
for nearly 70 years. Because nanostructures allow us to drive the material out of
equilibrium through the local application of large electric fields, we discovered a
nonequilibrium phase transition in magnetite that sheds new light on the nature of the
material’s rich ground state.