Michael F. Crommie

Biosketch

Michael F. Crommie, PhD is a Professor in the University of California, Berkeley Physics Department and a Faculty Senior Scientist in the Materials Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as well as co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute at UC Berkeley and LBNL. He earned his BS in Physics from the University of California, Los Angeles and his PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, joined the Boston University Physics Department faculty in 1994, and then moved to the UC Berkeley Physics Department in 1999. He is a Vannevar-Bush Faculty Fellow, an American Physical Society Fellow, and a member of the NAS (section 33). Awards include the Davisson-Germer Prize, the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, a Sloan Foundation fellowship, and an NSF Young Investigator award.

Research Interests

Dr. Crommie’s research is focused on exploring local electronic, magnetic, and mechanical properties of low-dimensional nanostructures, including bottom-up-fabricated molecular networks, 2D materials, and van der Waals-bonded heterostructure devices. Dr. Crommie’s main tool for probing nanoscale behavior is scanned probe microscopy. He uses scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopy in cryogenic, ultrahigh vacuum environments to visualize electronic wave functions, density fluctuations, and spin behavior down to the atomic scale. One of Dr. Crommie’s research strategies is to fabricate new 1D and 2D covalently-bonded molecular nanostructures having rationally designed properties, and to test their predicted behavior using scanned probe microscopy. Another main pursuit is to characterize the local properties of single-layer materials just one or a few atoms thick, including heterostructures where single layers are stacked on top of each other. This includes visualizing how such systems behave when they are incorporated into devices that allow their charge density and electrical current to be continuously varied. Such measurements enable quantum mechanical theories of electronic behavior to be tested for the smallest possible artificial structures. Questions of interest to Dr. Crommie in this context involve the experimental consequences of electron-electron interactions, confinement effects, topology, defect formation, optical excitation, and quantum magnetism.