Associate Professor of Physics Peter Abbamonte has been selected to receive a 2010 Xerox Award for Faculty Research, presented by the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois.
An experimentalist, Abbamonte studies elementary quantum mechanical processes in condensed matter systems, such as collective excitations in interacting electron systems, electron self-organization in doped Mott insulators ("stripes"), and other forms of topological order, and edge states and interface effects in oxide devices.
Abbamonte is a co-inventor of resonant soft x-ray scattering, a powerful imaging technique that has rapidly been adopted at every major synchrotron facility in the world. He is also highly regarded for his solution of the phase problem in inelastic x-ray scattering, which has provided a means to perform imaging of electron motion in materials at attosecond time resolution.
Since joining the Department of Physics at Illinois in 2005, Abbamonte has worked with colleagues from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and the University of Michigan to lead the construction of a new beamline and instrument at the Advanced Photon Source at the Argonne National Laboratory. The instrument combines two techniques—angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and soft x-ray resonant scattering—to allow new studies of materials and patterned devices.
An Illinois alumnus, Abbamonte received his PhD in physics from our department in 1999. Following an National Science Foundation International Research Fellowship at the University of Groningen, a postdoc in biophysics at Cornell University, and work as a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, he returned to Urbana in 2005. His development of advanced experimental tools is transforming the capabilities of spectroscopy to unravel the mysteries of complex superconducting and magnetic systems.