Levy received his B.A. degree from Harvard University (1988), and his Ph.D. in physics from University of California, Santa Barbara (1993) under the supervision of Mark Sherwin. After his Ph.D., he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara with David Awschalom. He started his independent academic career as an assistant professor in physics in 1996 and currently distinguished professor of physics in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh. He also holds an Adjunct Faculty position in both physics and electrical and computer engineering departments at Carnegie Mellon University.
Early acting career
Levy also worked as a film and television actor from age 11 to 12. He acted in NBC's Holocaust, and played the role of Aaron Feldman. He also had a lead role in the feature film Rich Kids, playing the role of Jamie Harris.
Levy's research interests center around the emerging field of oxide nanoelectronics, experimental and theoretical realizations for quantum computation, semiconductor and oxide spintronics, quantum transport and nanoscale optics, and dynamical phenomena in oxide materials and films.
Levy’s early Ph.D. research focused on the nonlinear dynamical properties of sliding charge-density waves.[2] His postdoctoral research investigated the properties of dilute magnetic semiconductor heterostructures, where he developed a low-temperature near-field scanning optical microscope and used it to investigate Mn-doped ZnSe/(Zn,Cd)Se heterostructure and superlattices as well as self-assembled quantum dots.
After moving to the University of Pittsburgh, Levy began a research program centered around high-resolution imaging of the spatial and temporal dynamics of ferroelectric thin films. In 1999, Levy worked toward an experimental realization of a quantum computer based on ferroelectrically coupled Ge/Si quantum dots.[3] Levy was funded through the DARPA QuIST program that supported the Center for Oxide-Semiconductor Materials for Quantum Computation, which Levy directed for 10 years. During that time, Levy initiated a theoretical research effort aimed at developing various families of logical qubits based on spin pairs,[4] spin clusters,[5] cluster-state qubits,[6] and dimerized spin chains.[7]
In 2006, Levy visited the group of Jochen Mannhart who had discovered a sharp insulator-to-metal transition in oxide heterostructure composed of a thin layer of LaAlO3 grown on TiO2-terminated SrTiO3. The 3-unit-cell LaAlO3/SrTiO3 was metastable and could be switched with a voltage applied to the back of the SrTiO3substrate. Levy and his student Cheng Cen showed that a biased conductive atomic force microscope tip could locally switch the interface of the 3-unit-cell LaAlO3/SrTiO3 heterostructure system,[8] thus launching a new field that Levy refers to as “Correlated Nanoelectronics”.
Other areas of research
Levy has conducted research in a variety of areas:
Apertureless near-field scanning optical microscopy, applied principally to polar nanodomains in ferroelectric thin films.[9]
Development of g-tensor modulation resonance as a method for all-electrical control of spin in semiconductor heterostructure.[10]
Development of conductive-AFM lithography for extreme nanoscale control of the metal-insulator transition in LaAlO3/SrTiO3 heterostructure.[11]
Discovery of room-temperature electronically controlled ferromagnetism in LaAlO3/SrTiO3 heterostructure.[12]
Development of sketched LaAlO3/SrTiO3 single-electron transistors,[13] electron waveguides,[14] and other mesoscopic physics devices
Discovery of electron pairing without superconductivity in sketched LaAlO3/SrTiO3 devices.[15]
Development of 100 THz-bandwidth generation and detection of THz emission in nanoscale LaAlO3/SrTiO3 junctions[16]
