Axel Scherer

Axel Scherer is Professor of Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, and Physics at the California Institute of Technology, specializing in device microfabrication and packaging. He graduated from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in 1985 and worked in the Quantum Device Fabrication group at Bellcore for the following eight years. In the past, Scherer specialized in improving the state of the art of semiconductor microfabrication, which resulted in the development of the smallest vertical cavity lasers (400nm wide) and some of the world's smallest etched structures (6nm wide), as well as ultranarrow gratings (30nm pitch). He has also been working on reducing the sizes of microlasers and changing their emission wavelengths. Scherer's research laboratory is built around producing nanostructures and applying them to new optoelectonic, magnetooptic, and high-speed electronic devices. The aim of his research group is to develop functional devices that use their reduced geometries to obtain higher speed and greater efficiencies, and can be integrated into systems in large numbers.