Lannin Memorial Lecture Set for 17 April 2002

28 March 2002 -- Roberto D. Merlin, professor of physics, electrical engineering, and computer science at the University of Michigan, will present the Jeffrey S. Lannin Memorial Lecture in Physics on Wednesday, 17 April 2002, at 4:00 p.m. in 117 Osmond Laboratory. The free public lecture is titled "The Dark Side of the Cherenkov Effect: Light Emitting Light at Subluminal Speeds."

Merlin's research specialty is experimental condensed-matter physics. His current interests focus on the interactions of solid materials with ultrafast laser pulses. His areas of expertise include the use of various optical-spectroscopic techniques to study a wide range of materials systems, such as rare-earth magnetic semiconductors, transition-metal oxides, superconductors, intercalated graphite, and semiconductor superlattices. Among the many significant contributions Merlin and his collaborators have made in these fields are their pioneering experimental work on Fibonacci superlattices, the quantum-confined Pockels effect, and magneto-Raman scattering.

Merlin is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. Following his election as vice-chair of the American Physical Society Forum on International Physics in 1994, he served as chair-elect in 1995 and as Chair in 1996. In 1998, Merlin joined the editorial board of the Springer Series in Solid-State Sciences.

Merlin was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he received a masters degree in physics from the University of Buenos Aires in 1973. He earned his doctoral degree at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1978. After a postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois, he joined the physics faculty at the University of Michigan in 1980, where he was appointed in 1993 to a three-year term as associate chair for research and facilities of the Department of Physics. Since 2000, he has held a joint appointment in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The Lannin Memorial Lectures are supported by donations to the Eberly College of Science Jeffrey S. Lannin Memorial Fund in memory of Lannin, who was a professor of physics at Penn State from 1986 until his death in 1997.

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