UA Physicist Named to Endowed Nanotechnology Chair

The University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville announced that physics professor Min Xiao has been named the inaugural holder of its university-endowed Twenty-First Century Chair in Nanotechnology, created to bring together scientists to study behavioral changes at the nanoscale in materials such as living cells, semiconductors, optoelectronic materials, surface coatings and metals with support from the university's Arkansas-Oklahoma Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. Since joining the physics department in 1990, Xiao has received nearly $5 million in funding from sources including the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and the Army Research Office and has been a co-principal investigator or major participant in projects totalling more than $15 million. Xiao and fellow researchers are working on projects that range from the quantum statistical properties of light to applied optics. Using optical techniques, they are investigating the properties of semiconductor nanostructures and new functional materials and their applications and also studying dynamic and statistical processes in multistate systems. Since 2002, Xiao and his group have published 68 refereed papers in scientific journals such as Physical Review Letters, Applied Physics Letters, Nano Letters, Optics Letters and IEEE Quantum Electronics. Xiao is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America. In 2007, he will serve as general co-chair of the Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference, one of the largest international conferences in lasers and quantum electronics.