Wittgenstein Award Laureate
Wittgenstein Award Laureate 1997 Univ. Prof. Dr. Erich Gornik
Semiconductor Nanoelectronics, Vienna University of Technology
Institut für Festkörperelektronik TU Wien 
SHEDDING LIGHT ONTO THE SMALLEST MATTERS
The physicist Erich Gornik is leading research projects on new light and laser sources and semiconductor nanostructures that are so small that quantum effects play a part. The Vienna University for Technology’s Institute for Solid State Physics, of which he is Director, is recognized as one of Austria’s centres of scientific excellence and houses research with great commercial potential. Whoever wins the ”battle of the blue laser” will have a technology available that will permit CDs with many times higher storage capacity than to date. ”A problem,” says Gornik, ”is that it is very difficult to produce the starting material gallium nitrite, required for short wavelength light, in a perfectly crystalline form.”
His team is also working on applying the surface plasmon principle to light production. Plasmons are oscillations in electron density and they can be used to generate light of defined direction and frequency. Gornik has in mind to contribute to the development of a new type of lamp. ”The question is how to produce light as efficiently as possible. Semiconducting materials, which can produce light internally with a high efficiency, will play an important part in the future.”
Work on a new version of the Bloch Oscillator is also at the experimental stage. Gornik’s group has grown crystals (by molecular beam epitaxy) that show quantum effects. These components emit light in the Terahertz region (1 THz = 1012 Hz), which is 1000-times higher than the frequencies presently used for communications. The Viennese group is generally considered to be the leading group worldwide in this technology. With the receipt of the Wittgenstein Prize in 1997 Gornik ”could for the first time start really risky projects and buy equipment that could not have been justified on the basis of a single project.” Such as a device for molecular beam epitaxy for producing new materials. ”We want to grow antimonide and nitride to extend the principle of the quantum cascade laser to shorter wavelengths (up to 1.5 microns).” The ultimate goal is the generation of light sources for optical communication but preliminary work of several years will be required merely for growing the crystals.
Secondly, Gornik was able to obtain a scanning capacity microscope. This allows the characterization of semiconductor devices with extremely small dimensions, thereby contributing to their further development. In addition, the scanning capacity microscope can be used to investigate biological systems (such as electrical activities in cells), ”a completely new area for me.”
Thirdly, Gornik and his colleagues were able to demonstrate a new measurement technique for rapid two-dimensional temperature measurement in semiconductor devices. A key factor behind this achievement was a newly acquired high-intensity infra-red laser.
The group around Gornik has successfully performed experiments with the help of the Wittgenstein Prize on quantum transport through super-lattices. ”For the first time we were able to demonstrate electrically induced quantum states in a simple electrical current experiment.”
