Rachel Angharad Oliver is a Professor of Materials Science at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge. She works on characterisation techniques for gallium nitride materials for dark-emitting diodes and laser diodes.

Early life and education

Oliver studied engineering and materials science at the University of Oxford and completed an industrial placement in metallurgy. Her final year masters project was in optoelectronic materials. She completed her Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Oxford in 2003, where she began to work with gallium nitride under the supervision of

Andrew Briggs (George) Andrew Davidson Briggs (born 1950) is a British scientist. He is Professor of Nanomaterials in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford. He is best known for his early work in acoustic microscopy and his current work in ...

. She used metalorganic vapour-phase epitaxy (MOVPE) to grow

quantum dot Quantum dots (QDs) are semiconductor particles a few nanometres in size, having light, optical and electronics, electronic properties that differ from those of larger particles as a result of quantum mechanics. They are a central topic in nanote ...

Research and career

She joined the University of Cambridge in 2003 as a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 postdoctoral research fellow. In 2006 Oliver was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) at the University of Cambridge. She studied the morphology of gallium nitride light-emitting diodes (LEDs), identifying what factors controlled their efficiency and the impact of defects. She was awarded an

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences, mainly to universi ...

(EPSRC) grant to study semi-polar nitride based structures. She was appointed a lecturer at the University of Cambridge in 2011. Oliver studies gallium nitride materials for LEDs and laser diodes. Her research considers ways to engineer the nanostructure of light emitting diodes and how this impacts macroscopic device performance. She has developed

atom-probe tomography The atom probe was introduced at th14th Field Emission Symposium in 1967by Erwin Wilhelm Müller and J. A. Panitz. It combined a field ion microscope with a mass spectrometer having a single particle detection capability and, for the first time, ...

and

scanning capacitance microscopy Scanning capacitance microscopy (SCM) is a variety of scanning probe microscopy in which a narrow probe electrode is positioned in contact or close proximity of a sample's surface and scanned. SCM characterizes the surface of the sample using inform ...

to study nitride devices. Oliver is also working on single-photon indium gallium nitride quantum dots for quantum crystallography. She has looked at the impact of threading dislocations on the quality factor of InGaN cavities. Her group developed the first blue-emitting single-photon source. She was the first to note

rabi oscillation In physics, the Rabi cycle (or Rabi flop) is the cyclic behaviour of a two-level quantum system in the presence of an oscillatory driving field. A great variety of physical processes belonging to the areas of quantum computing, condensed matter p ...

s of GaN quantum dots. She designed a quasi-two-temperature growth method to pattern GaN quantum dots, which improved their emission by a factor of ten.

Awards and honours

Oliver was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (FIMMM) in 2019. She held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship from 2006 to 2011. In 2021 she was elected a Fellow of the

Royal Academy of Engineering The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) is the United Kingdom's national academy of engineering. The Academy was founded in June 1976 as the Fellowship of Engineering with support from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who became the first senior ...

, and in 2023 was awarded the academy's Chair in Emerging Technologies.

Personal life

Oliver's husband is a cardiologist with whom she has a son.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Oliver, Rachel Year of birth missing (living people) Living people British materials scientists Alumni of the University of Oxford Academics of the University of Cambridge Fellows of Robinson College, Cambridge Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering Female Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering Fellows of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining