History

…just about
anything
that glows!

The Semiconductor Spectroscopy and Devices group at the University of Strathclyde began its activities in 1987 as a wing of Professor Brian Henderson’s Solid State Materials Group. It became a separate entity in 1990 with a mission “to explore the optoelectronic device capabilities of less-well-developed semiconductors”: at first, visibly emitting semiconductor compounds from the Zn(Cd)S(Se) family.

Superlattices and quantum wells, including ZnSe-ZnS, CdSe-ZnSe, CdS-ZnS, CdSe-CdS (hex) and CdS-ZnSe (hex-cubic), have since been studied in detail.

In 1991, we began studies of the novel semiconductor porous silicon. Since 1993 magneto-optic studies of strained-layer III-V heterostructures have joined the list, and more recently (since 1995) we have worked on:

gallium nitride (GaN)
indium gallium nitride (In_xGa_1-xN)
silicon quantum dots
chalcopyrites (e.g. CuInSe₂, Cu(In,Ga)Se₂)
zinc oxide (ZnO)
cuprate superconductors

dilute nitrides
geological minerals (e.g. calcite, zircon)
fossilised trilobite eyes
metallic nanoparticles
9th century Chinese paper…

…in fact, just about anything that glows!

The group has hosted a number of national and international conferences, including:

Nanolight13: Control and applications of light at the nanoscale, 2–3 September 2013
9^th International Conference on Nitride Semiconductors (ICNS), 10–15 July 2011
RMS Electron Backscatter Diffraction Conference, 3–4 April 2006
5^th International Conference on the Physics of Light-Matter Coupling in Nanostructures (PLMCN-5), 8–11 June 2005