Sotomayor Torres, Clivia Marfa
ICREA Research Professor at Institut Català de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia (ICN2).
Engineering Sciences
Short biography
Clivia obtained her PhD in Physics (Manchester Univ., UK 1984). She held tenured appointments at St. Andrews and Glasgow Universities and became a C4 professor at Wuppertal Univ. (Germany 1996). During 2004-8 she was a research professor at Univ. College Cork, Tyndall National Institute (Ireland). Since 2007 she is at ICN2 and heads a 17-strong team working on phonon engineering and nanofabrication. Clivia received awards from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Nuffield Foundation and an Amelia Earhart Fellowship from ZONTA International (USA). She is author of 602 scientific works), of which 555 are in the WoS, has an h-index of 50 (WoS) and over 10,900 citations (WoS). She was a guest professor at the P. Sabatier Univ. Toulouse and at KTH in Sweden. During the Winter Semester 2022-23 she is the Mittlesten-Scheid guest professor at the University of Wuppertal. Since 2020 she is member of the Academia Europaea.
Research interests
Her group investigates new concepts for multi-state variables based on the engineered interactions of phonons with photons, electrons and magnons, in device-like structures. One particular interest is thermal transport at the nanoscale to address heat dissipation in nanoelectronics, the role of phonons in noise and dissipation in nano-scale systems. Another strand is Si-based opto-mechanics for phonon-based information processing which acquired two research grants this year. Our experimental research portfolio has expanded substantially, specially towards 2D materials. The ERC project LEIT made substantial progress in the realisation of mechanical gaps with guided modes. During 2021 we made considerable progress in experimental phononic waveguides exhibiting phonon lasing and in multimode coupling in optomechanical circuits.