Sheena Murphy
| Title: | Associate Professor |
| Education: | B.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1984 |
| Ph.D. Cornell University, 1991 | |
| Office: | 137 Nielsen Hall |
| Phone: | 405-325-3961, ext. 36137 |
| Email: | murphy@nhn.ou.edu |
| No Research Home Page |
Over the last few years, my group has focused on the study of electrons in confined geometries. A two imensional confinement is achieved when the electrons reside in a thin low bandgap semiconductor sandwiched between layers of a higher bandgap material. Further confinement results from processing the semiconductor sample into wires or dots using lithography techniques. As of late, it is in these reduced dimensional systems that some of the more significant developments in condensed matter physics have been found such as the integer and fractional quantum Hall effect, and quantized conductance in point contacts, to name a few.
At the University of Oklahoma, we have access to a particularly interesting semiconductor system, InSb. This material has an extremely low electron effective mass resulting in high mobility and a very large Lande g factor resulting in large spin effects. My group has been engaged in the study of the quantum Hall effect in this unique system. More recently we have started experiments to study spin injection and spin transport as well.
We perform our experiments at low temperatures (from 10K to 0.01K) and in high magnetic fields (up to 15 Tesla). In addition to our low temperature/high field facilities, we also use the optical lithography facility of the Solid State group. In this facility we can fabricate devices with submicron sized features, package them for our experiments and perform room temperature inspection and characterization. In addition our affliliation with the OU/Arkansas Materials Center gives us access to a number of other magnetic, optical and electronic probes.
