Chris Phillips

Chris Phillips is the former Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and head of the Optoelectronics section at Imperial College London. Career Phillips travelled in the developing world and worked for the BBC before taking up a faculty position in the Physics department of Imperial College London in 1985, at the age of 27. He was a visiting researcher at the Quantum Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara in 1997–98. He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2006, and served as Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Imperial College London from 2008 to 2011. His research centres on the optical properties of semiconductor nanostructures. He is known for his work on electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), a quantum optical effect whereby a crystal can be made to effectively disappear when it is illuminated by a sufficiently powerful invisible laser. Most recently he is applying the techniques and devices developed over his research career to make ultra-efficient solar cells, and "Quantum Metamaterials" . The latter can be used to make new types of optical components, e.g. "superlenses" that beat the normal limits to image sharpness imposed by the laws of diffraction.