Dr. Karsten Fleischer
Dr. Fleischer's research focuses on thin film oxides and oxide surface modifications for energy and ICT applications. This includes their thorough characterisation in terms of stoichiometry, optical-, electrical-, and crystallographic properties using various deposition and characterisation techniques. His research also includes the investigations of the surface states in such oxides by electrical and surface sensitive optical characterisation methods.
Dr. Karsten Fleischer is an Associate Professor on Surface and Interface Science and Characterisation of Advanced Materials/Nanomaterials in the School of Physical Sciences in Dublin City University since 2018. He received his PhD at the TU Berlin in 2005. He was an IRCSET Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin till 2007 and continued to work as Postdoctoral Fellow in TCDs Applied Physics Research Group.
Research Interests
My research focus are investigations on oxide materials for sensor and energy applications, in particular transparent conducting oxides (TCOs). My main interest is to link and control various thin film properties (transparency, conductivity, band gap, work function) to growth parameters, in particular for novel ternary oxides. Research aspect are reducing growth temperature and functional tuning of industrially relevant oxide materials (electron conducting (n-type) TCOs such as ZnO, ZTO, FTO ), screening for novel hole conducting (p-type) TCOs. The growth methods of choice are spray pyrolysis and atomic layer deposition (ALD)
I also investigate the influence of surface terminations on conductive properties (gas sensors) and the growth mode of the oxide in the first place. For this I'm employing extensive surface science tools such as X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) and optical surface science methods such as reflectance anisotropy spectroscopy (RAS).
As the main PI for a new DCU infrastructure (AM-CHAMP) I'm expanding my research now into automated measurements of composition gradient samples correlating stoichiometry measurements by XPS, Hard XPS, and Auger microscopy with additional valence and conduction band measurements via UV-photoemmission and inverse photoemission.
Teaching Interests
I was the initial program chair of the newest Physics degree program "BSc in Physics with Data Analytics", in it's formative phase. Along with core physics skills and knowledge, the course covers machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, emerging quantum technologies, coding, databases, data visualisation and more. At tis stage I'm the program chair for the established "BSc in Applied Physics" in line with my research interests.
I'm currently teaching in the 2nd and 3rd year phhysics labs, give a course on Nanotechnology and Surface Characterisation for undergraduate and also postgraduate students, as well as teach in the 2nd year Databases and Datavisualisation modules specifically designed for the Physics with Data Analytics students.