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NEWS | Feb. 4, 2015

Dr. Carl Stephen Hellberg Named Fellow of the American Physical Society

By Daniel Parry

U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) research physicist, Dr. Carl Stephen Hellberg, is elected Fellow by the American Physical Society (APS) for creative and influential contributions in the fields of strongly correlated materials, quantum dots, defects, and heterostructures.

Arriving at NRL in 1996 as a National Research Council (NRC) research associate, Hellberg has concentrated on researching the physics of surfaces and interfaces using density functional theory, concentrating on low-dimensional systems and the surfaces and interfaces of bulk crystals.

Dr. Hellberg is recognized for his work demonstrating the limits of strontium titanate to coherently grow beyond a few layers on silicon and how chemical substitutions at the interface can produce a better interface and more uniform thin films, said Dr. Michael Mehl, head, Center for Computational Material Science. I am very delighted he has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for his groundbreaking work in the field of computational physics.

Hellberg's current research includes first principles calculations of surfaces, interfaces, and thin films. He is focusing on oxides and chalcogenides, including polarity mismatched interfaces, topological insulators, and monolayer heterostructures, with a particular interests in electrical properties and metal-insulator transitions. He also works on strongly correlated electron systems, including quantum dots, nanocrystals, and transition metal oxides.

Hellberg received his undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University in 1987, and then studied for a year at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich on a Fulbright Fellowship. He enrolled in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked with professor Eugene J. Mele, receiving his Ph.D. in 1993. He spent three years working with professor Efstratios Manousakis at Florida State University in a postdoctoral appointment developing computational techniques to study strongly correlated electrons.

The APS is a non-profit membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics. APS Fellows are elected on the criterion of exceptional contributions to the physics enterprise that are comprised of outstanding physics research, important applications of physics, leadership in or service to physics, or significant contributions to physics education.

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