Maurice S. Skolnick

Maurice Sidney Skolnick is a British physicist and Emeritus Professor of Experimental Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Sheffield. His research concerns the optoelectronic properties of semiconductor materials and nanostructures, including quantum dots, semiconductor microcavities and photonic crystals.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2009 and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2011.

Education

In 1972, Skolnick obtained a BSc with first-class honours at the University of Oxford. In 1975, he completed a PhD. His doctoral thesis, supervised by R. A. Stradling, was titled Infrared Studies of Semiconductors. He became Emeritus Professor in September 2025. He has also served as Research Director, and previously as deputy and co-director, of the EPSRC National Centre for III–V Technologies at Sheffield, later renamed the National Epitaxy Facility. He held an EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship from 2001 to 2006 and received a five-year European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant in 2012. In the late 1970s, while working at the Max Planck Institute with D. Bimberg, he contributed to experimental studies of electron–hole liquids in compound semiconductors.

He contributed to work on magnetic-field-induced indirect gaps in semiconductor systems with D. M. Whittaker. He reported an early observation of population inversion in semiconductor quantum wells using resonant-tunnelling techniques with J. W. Cockburn, h.

From 1995 onwards, Skolnick worked extensively on the physics of exciton-polaritons in semiconductor microcavities, including electric-field and temperature tuning of exciton-photon coupling. His Sheffield group, in collaboration with J. J. Baumberg, reported continuous-wave stimulated scattering in semiconductor microcavities in 2000.

His research group also contributed to studies of Bose–Einstein condensation and superfluid behaviour in polariton systems.

He studied quantum-dot energy levels, carrier relaxation mechanisms and the alignment of electron and hole wavefunctions within quantum dots.

He worked on phonon-assisted population inversion of single quantum dots using pulsed laser excitation, a mechanism used to demonstrate on-demand single-photon emission.

His group has also developed quantum-dot-based single-photon sources embedded in photonic-crystal cavities and waveguides, including sources operating at telecommunications wavelengths.

AegiQ

In December 2019, Skolnick was one of four co-founders of AegiQ, a quantum photonics spin-out company from the University of Sheffield, alongside Maksym Sich, Scott Dufferwiel and Jon Heffernan. The company develops single-photon sources and photonic quantum-computing hardware based on research originating at the University of Sheffield.

Awards and honours

Mott Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics (2002), for contributions to the understanding of excitons, defects and interactions in semiconductors. Elected Fellow of the Royal Society (2009). Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2011). Optics and Photonics Prize of the Institute of Physics (2018), for work on coupled light-matter systems and quantum optical circuits based on semiconductor quantum dots.