Christopher P. Weber is an associate professor of physics at Santa Clara University whose research explores how ultrafast optical techniques can probe the dynamics of spin, charge, and heat in quantum materials.
Weber received his A.B. and Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999 and 2005, respectively. He studied the motion of electron spin in semiconductors. He stayed in Berkeley at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a post-doctoral researcher through 2008, using pulsed x-rays to study the bonding states of warm, dense matter.
Since coming to Santa Clara in 2008, Professor Weber has built an “ultrafast optics” laboratory, using laser pulses less than .0001 nanoseconds long to study the motion of electrons in solids. He has studied semiconductors such as GaAs and InP that are widely used in electronic devices, and the magnetic semiconductor (Ga,Mn)As. His current work focuses on the newly-discovered Dirac and Weyl semimetals, materials in which electrons behave as though massless.
