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Director: Pertti Hakonen
Secretary:

Fax: +358 9 470 22969

Mail address:
PO BOX 15100
00076 AALTO
FINLAND

Visiting address:
Puumiehenkuja 2B
Otaniemi, Espoo

How to find us

Vastuualue: T31100
VAT number: FI22283574

Tero Heikkilä

 My book "The Physics of Nanoelectronics" has been published by Oxford University Press. You can order it from this link (paperback) or here (hardback).

The book has also a separate web site.

My skype account is tero.h2 and my ResearcherID is here.

Since August 2013, I am a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Jyväskylä. I will move my web pages there soon. However, I am also the head of the Nano Theory group.

I concentrate in my research on physical phenomena in nanoelectronic structures, especially on those dealing with their charge and heat transport properties. Below you can find some information regarding my work interests and history.

My old web page still contains an updated list of publications, the rest of the information is updated less regularly.

List of interesting meetings

Research

My recent work has been related to the following topics:

• Heattronics, study of heat transport in electronic nanostructures. For example, we have been the first to study phenomena related to the fluctuations of the temperature (not thermal noise but rather the time-dependent changes in the temperature of a small system related to the fluctuations in the heat transport into and out of them).
• Superconducting nanostructures, especially hybrid structures fabricated from superconductors and normal metals, and different types of nonequilibrium effects in them. Our latest research has been on studying effects induced by high-frequency radiation.
• Shot noise, i.e., nonequilibrium noise in the current.
• Physical phenomena in nanoelectromechanics, i.e., studying what happens in electronically controlled small mechanical resonators.
• Topological media. These are media which can be described using the concept of topological charge. Such charges are integer-valued and independent on the exact microscopic details of the materials. Boundaries between topologically non-trivial (i.e., nonzero topological charge) and trivial (zero topological charge) contain surface or edge states which often determine the main properties of these structures.
• Spintronics, especially spin caloritronics.
• Properties of graphene. We have for example studied cross correlations and different types of inelastic scattering effects in graphene.

More information on these topics can be found from my publications.

Some of my ideas are also presented in my blogs (in Finnish).

My curriculum

• I started research work as a research assistant in the Materials Physics Laboratory of Helsinki University of Technology in June 1996.
• I spent the summer 1997 as a research student in Lancaster University in the UK.
• I became a Master of Science in June 1998 and immediately started graduate studies in the Materials Physics Laboratory.
• I worked in the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, from July 1999 to the end of August 2000, as part of my doctoral thesis work.
• I had my doctoral diputation on my thesis "Superconducting proximity effect in mesoscopic metals" in December 2002.
• I started as a post-doctoral scientist in the Low Temperature Laboratory in September 2002, and have worked here since that except for a few long visits elsewhere.
• Between August 2004 until the end of March 2005 I worked in the University of Basel, Switzerland, as a post-doc.
• In 2008 I spent four months in the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, as a visiting researcher.

Students

I have advised the following doctoral theses:

• Matti Laakso: Temperature Fluctuations and Heat Transport in Nanoelectronics (2012)
• Juha Voutilainen: Nanocircuits with Superconductivity - Nonequilibrium Studies (2012)
• Pauli Virtanen: Nonequilibrium and Transport in Proximity of Superconductors (2009)
• Teemu Ojanen: Quantum Fluctuations and Transport in Mesoscopic Physics (2007)

In addition, I participated in advising Markku Stenberg's dissertation Quantum Coherence and Mesoscopic Fluctuations.

More information on my teaching experience is here.

Nanoelectronics lecture notes: Table of contents (free access) and Full notes (get password and account from me).

Funding

There are nowadays two types of funding for academic research work (mostly including the salaries of the researchers and their groups): competed and competed. The difference between the two is that the first comes along with a position in a university, but first one has to compete for that position, whereas the latter one comes from different foundations, state funding agencies (in Finland, these are Tekes and the Academy of Finland), or EU. Most of my funding comes from the latter source:

• From the summer 2005 to summer 2006: Academy of Finland postdoctoral position
• From the summer 2006 to summer 2011: Academy of Finland research fellow
• In 2009 I was awarded the ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council. This funding started in January 2010 and lasts until the end of 2014.

Talks

I have given some invited talks in different meetings:

• Huge thermoelectric effects in ferromagnet-superconductor junctions in the presence of an exchange field, 27.11. 2013, Workshop "Quantum Thermoelectrics: Dynamics, Fluctuations and Non-linearities", Aachen, Germany
• High temperature surface superconductivity in rhombohedral graphite, 16.10. 2013, Workshop "Coherent Hybrid Structures on the Mesoscale", Evanston, the USA
• High temperature superconductivity at graphite interfaces, 1.10. 2013 BuildMoNa Advanced Module "Quantum Coherent Structures: Quantum Structures for Energy Applications", University of Leipzig, Germany
• Mesoscopic heattronics: thermal and nonequilibrium effects and fluctuations in nanoelectronics, 13.9. 2013 Physics Colloquium, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
• Enhancing the optomechanical coupling via the Josephson effect, 10.9. 2013 Microkelvin workshop, Porvoo, Finland
• Non-universal shot noise in quasiequilibrium spin valves, 18.3. 2013 APS March Meeting, Baltimore, USA
• Manifestly non-Gaussian temperature fluctuations in superconductor - normal metal - superconductor structures, 4.9.2012 Superconducting Nanohybrids 2012, San Sebastian, Spain
• "Quantum mechanics of mechanical systems: micromechanical oscillator close to the ground state", 18.10.2011 MatSurf symposium, University of Turku, Finland
• High-Temperature Surface Superconductivity in Topological Flat Band Systems, 22.6.2011
  Highlights in Quantum Condensed Matter Physics, San Sebastian, Spain
• Spin Heat Accumulation and Its Relaxation in Spin Valves, 12.5.2011
  Spin Caloritronics III, Leiden, the Netherlands
• Spin Heat Accumulation and Its Relaxation in Spin Valves, 28.4.2011
  2011 MRS Spring meeting, San Francisco, USA
• SNS junctions in microwave fields, 6.9.2010
  SM2010 - Superconductivity and magnetism: Hybrid proximity nanotructures and intrinsic phenomena, Paestum, Italy
• Temperature fluctuations in electron systems out of equilibrium, 21.6.2010
  Workshop on the physics of micro and nano scale systems, Ystad, Sweden
• Mesoscopic heattronics: Thermal effects in nanostructures, 9.2.2009
  Workshop "Spin Caloritronics", Leiden
• What happens when superconductivity leaks?, 15.2.2008
  Physics colloquium, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
• Nonequilibrium and thermoelectric effects in proximity structures, 13.4.2007
  Condensed Matter and Materials Physics Conference, Leicester, UK
• Nonequilibrium and thermoelectric effects in proximity structures, 12.12.2006
  374. Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Seminar "Spin Physics in Superconducting Heterostructures", Bad Honnef, Germany
• Nonequilibrium-controlled SNS Josephson junctions, 9.1.2003
  Workshop on Quantum Transport and Mesoscopic Physics, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
• Universal Conductance Fluctuations in Mesoscopic Normal - Superconducting Structures, 10.8. 1999
  LT22 - 22nd international conference on Low Temperature physics, Espoo, Finland

Slides for some of my talks (very old)