Tero Heikkilä
Scientific Director of the JYU
Nanoscience Center
Professor
Department of Physics
Nanoscience Center
University of Jyväskylä
Tel: +358 40 8054804
Office: YN214, Survontie 9, Jyväskylä
Email: firstname.T.surname@jyu.fi
Postal address: P.O. Box 35, 40014 University of Jyväskylä
See also my group web page here.
My book "The Physics of Nanoelectronics" has been published by
Oxford University Press. You can order it from Amazon.
The book has also a separate web
site.
My skype account is tero.h2.
Research
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. For information about my research
group, please follow this
link.
List of publications
My recent work has been related to the following topics - see also
the description on the
site of my ERC project heattronics:
- 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. Especially, we have
predicted that such topological media with dispersionless (flat)
bands will promote very high-temperature superconductivity.
- 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 hybrids of superconducting and ferromagnetic
systems.
- Shot noise, i.e., nonequilibrium noise in the current.
- Physical phenomena in nanoelectromechanics and optomechanics,
i.e., studying what happens in electronically controlled small
mechanical resonators.
- Spintronics, especially spin caloritronics.
- Properties of graphene and graphite. 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, worked there (up to breaks) until
summer 2014 (Aug 2013-Jun 2014 as a part time researcher).
- 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.
- I am a professor of theoretical condensed matter physics in
Jyväskylä since August 2013.
- Since 2018, I am the Scientific Director of the University of
Jyväskylä Nanoscience Center.
Students
I have advised the following doctoral theses:
In addition, I participated in advising Markku Stenberg's
dissertation Quantum
Coherence and Mesoscopic Fluctuations.
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
lasted until the end of 2015.
- I was part of the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence on Low
Temperature
Quantum Devices and Applications 2006-2011 and 2012 and
2017.
- In 2016 I got the Academy of Finland key funding for studying
the possibility of using thermoelectric effects in
superconductor/ferromagnet systems for detector applications.
This funding started 1st October 2016, one day after the results
were released, and it lasts until the end of September 2018.
- I will coordinate an EU FET Open project SUPERTED (2018-2022),
focused to realize the world's first superconducting
thermoelectric detector.
Talks
I have given some invited talks in different meetings. Unfortunately
this list is almost constantly a bit outdated
- Giant thermoelectric effects in superconductor/ferromagnet
structures, 21.07.2016, Interfacial spintronics and spin
waves, San Sebastian, Spain
- Coupling charge, spin and heat transport in superconductors
with a spin splitting field, 14.12. 2015, NewSpin4
Utrecht, the Netherlands
- Topological media: exotic particles and a possible route to
room temperature superconductivity, Nanogune seminars
(colloquium), 27.10. 2015, San Sebastian, Spain
- Thermoelectric effects and spin injection in
superconductor-ferromagnet systems, 19.3. 2015, DPG Spring
meeting, Berlin, Germany
- Thermoelectric effects and spin injection in
superconductor-ferromagnet systems, 9.9. 2014,
International Workshop “Superconducting Nanocircuits – 2014”,
Maratea, Italy
- High-temperature surface superconductivity in topological
flat band systems, 28.5. 2014, International Conference on
Problems of Strongly Correlated and Interacting Systems, St
Petersburg, Russia
- Towards room temperature
superconductivity, 24.1. 2014, Nikolai Kopnin memorial
symposium, Espoo, Finland
- 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
Last modified 1st June, 2018