Professor David Dunstan
Professor of Experimental Physics
Email: d.dunstan@qmul.ac.ukTelephone: 020 7882 3411Room Number: G.O. Jones Building, Room 124
Research
Research Interests:
David Dunstan contributes to solid-state physics both as an optical spectroscopist and as a theoretician. He has several inventions exploited commercially, and he designed and aligned the lighting for the Hope diamond in the Smithsonian Museum.
He published the definitive article on the mechanism of luminescence in amorphous silicon [PDF 2,869KB], the promising new material for optoelectronics.
At Surrey, with Alf Adams, he added high pressure to his techniques and pioneered the miniaturisation of the diamond-anvil high-pressure cell [PDF 686KB] (*). High-pressure experiments have gathered much important data for optoelectronic technology, particularly using structures with built-in strain.
He has pioneered the use of strained semiconductor structures to achieve breakthroughs in the mechanical properties of solids. His current work is extending critical thickness theory to soft metals, demonstrating quantitatively that a minimum volume is required for plastic deformation, that reducing stressed volumes necessarily makes materials stronger, and that built-in strain modifies the properties profoundly.
Dunstan’s theoretical work has been based on the need to understand experimental results, but has also introduced new insights, e.g. his work on distant-pair recombination kinetics and the nearest-available-neighbour statistical distribution, and his simple scaling or geometrical argument [PDF 1,164KB] (**) for critical thickness.
Click here [PDF 73KB] for a full Publications List (PDF)
* Copyright: Copyright (1988) American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Dunstan and Scherrer, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 59, 627 (1988) and may be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?rsi/59/627.
** Copyright: Copyright (1991) American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Dunstan et al., J. Appl. Phys. 70, 3038 (1991) and may be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?jap/70/3038.
Publications
Supervision
This is not an exhaustive list and I would be happy to discuss other project possibilities.
| Project Title |
|---|
| The Size Effect: Theory and Experiment |