Roberto Merlin Ph.D.

Expertise: Spontaneous and stimulated Raman scattering, ultrafast optical techniques

Academic Discipline: Experimental condensed-matter physics

Appointments: Professor, Physics, College of Literature, Science, & Arts, Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, College of Engineering

Phone: (734) 763-9759 Other phone: (734) 764-8459

E-mail: merlin@umich.edu

· Areas of expertise include various conventional optical techniques, particularly spontaneous and impulsive Raman spectroscopy.
· Has used light scattering to study a wide range of systems such as rare-earth magnetic semiconductors, mixed-valence compounds, transition-metal oxides, A15 superconductors, intercalated graphite and GaAs-AlAs artificial structures.
· Current interests focus on the generation and control of coherent and squeezed phonons and electronic fields using ultrafast optical pulses.
· Pioneered experimental work on quasiperiodic (Fibonacci) superlattices and squeezed phonons; discovered the quantum-well Pockels effect; developed the technique of magneto-Raman scattering.
· Other significant contributions include the earliest light scattering studies of folded acoustic and interface phonons, shallow impurities and coupled intersubband Landau-level excitations in GaAs-AlAs heterostructures.