![[Picture of Joseph Pingenot]](/images/joe_japan_small.jpg)
About Joseph Pingenot
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oklahoma. I calculate electron and hole properties in semiconductor nanostructures using k-dot-p theory, although I'm more than willing to develop more in-depth knowledge of other methods such as density functional theory, pseudopotentials, and tight-binding should the need arise. Working closely with experimentalist collaborators has helped both guide my work and has helped examine data and explain their results. In performing calculations, I try to balance analytical and numerical techniques to quickly solve a problem and to try to make the solution as complete as possible.
Close collaboration with experimentalists, I have found, is essential to my work. It both serves as an avenue toward becoming better acquainted with experimental methods and the details of experimental techniques and abilities as well as provides a “grounding” to my theoretical approaches to keep my investigations relevant to the immediate- and near-term capabilities of experimentalists to measure and produce. When working with experimentalists, I've found that there's a good degree of back-and-forth, with the experimentalists helping to determine the direction of my work, and my work guiding the direction of their work to help save them time and money.
In my opinion, like theory and experiment, analytic and numeric methods of calculating physical quantities are critical complements. Analytic methods, on the one hand, allow one to explore to a fuller extent the behavior of a system, due to the resulting equations being continuous. Numerical methods, on the other hand, allow one to mix in more effects and complexity, allowing one to therefore calculate more realistic systems and scenarios, but at the expense of discretization of the inputs as well as the outputs.
Page last modified Monday, 30-Nov-2009 15:48:36 EST