Professor of Physics Laura H. Greene has been appointed to a Swanlund Chair in the Department of Physics. A chair is the highest named title for a faculty member at the University of Illinois and represents the university's recognition of the highest level of scholarly and professional achievement.

An internationally recognized experimentalist, Greene has made profound and lasting contributions to condensed matter physics and the physics of novel materials, particularly superconductors. Her studies of the effects of oxygen and atomic substitutions on the physical properties of bulk high-temperature superconductors and proximity effects and tunneling in artificially layered superconducting, magnetic, and heavy-fermion thin-film structures have been especially significant. Presently, her work is focused on thin-film growth and superconductive tunneling and proximity effects in high-T_c thin films and multilayers and interfaces between low-T_c materials and compound-semiconductor heterostructures.

Since her arrival at Illinois from Bellcore in 1992, she has achieved a number of noteworthy results:

• The first observation of broken time-reversal symmetry in a superconductor—Greene showed that the splitting of the zero-bias conductance peak at temperatures below 8K in zero-applied magnetic field is a signature of broken time reversal symmetry. Her measurements are consistent with the existence of an s-wave (conventional) superconductor?s forming at the surface of the d-wave YBCO superconductor, indicating the presence of both the dominant d-wave and subdominant s-wave superconducting channels at the surface.
• The first detection of the superconducting proximity effect by optical techniques—Greene used Raman scattering on superconducting Nb and NbN_x grown on InAs to observe changes in the near-surface electronic properties of the semiconductor as the superconducting critical temperature was crossed.
• Development of tunneling spectroscopy as a phase-sensitive technique to probe the d-wave nature of YBCO—Greene proved that the zero-bias conductance peak in tunneling conductance and its dependence on crystallographic orientation, temperature, magnetic field magnitude, magnetic field orientation, doping, and disorder are explained by a surface-induced Andreev bound state of the d-wave order superconducting parameter. Furthermore, she showed that this bound state can be used as a spectroscopic probe by measuring quasiparticle scattering rates.
• Growth, transport, and tunneling properties of (110)-oriented YBCO thin films—Greene has studied the influence of crystallographic orientation and doping on the tunneling and transport properties of this anisotropic superconductor. Her group is the only one in the world capable of growing these films in four different crystallographic orientations.

Greene received BS and MS degrees from Ohio State, and in 1984 received a Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University, where she investigated the linear and non-linear far-infrared properties of materials. She then joined Bell Laboratories, and then Bellcore, where she researched thin-film growth and tunneling of metallic multilayers, heavy fermions, superconductor-semiconductor hybrid structures, and high-temperature superconductors. In 1992, she joined the senior physics faculty at Illinois, where she continues her research on the physics of highly correlated electron materials.

Greene has served on General Council and Executive Board of the American Physical Society and is presently a delegate to the Low-Temperature Physics Commission of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, where she also serves on their US Liaison Committee. She is a founding member of the Board of Trustees of the Los Alamos-based Institute for Complex and Adaptive Materials. She was recently elected a General Councilor of the Gordon Research Conferences. In 1994, she received the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award of the American Physical Society.

She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1999, she received the E.O. Lawrence Award for Materials Research from the Department of Energy. Over her career, Greene has authored or co-authored more than 130 publications and has presented more than 150 invited talks at conferences and symposia.