James Rabeau
UPDATE: From January 16, 2012, James will no longer be employed at Macquarie University. He has taken a role in Management Consulting but should still be contactable using his existing email address. For research related information, please contact Dr Stefania Castelletto, Dr Torsten Gaebel or Dr Andrew Edmonds who are post-docs in the group and can be found on the MQ directory.
James is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at MQ, and currently leads the Diamond Nanoscience group. His background ranges from diamond chemical vapour deposition and materials science to optics, spectroscopy and single photon sources.
He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo in Canada and subsequently spent 6 months in the lab of Dr Donna Strickland doing ultrafast laser physics. James then took a position in industry at DALSA Inc., a CCD and CMOS image sensor and camera company. He then decided to take up post-graduate studies, and completed his PhD at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, in diamond chemical vapour deposition and plasma spectroscopy. His supervisors were Professor Phil John and Professor John Wilson. The main interest was to understand the role of C2 in diamond CVD using a fascinating technique called cavity ring-down spectroscopy. For this work James built a spectrometer and measured the concentration of the C2 radical inside a microwave plasma.
James was a research fellow at the Micro Analytical Research Centre in the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne in the group of Professor Steven Prawer from 2003 to 2006. In this role James developed a technique to grow single Nickel defects in diamond and a technique to grow diamonds on optical fibres. Some of James' work was patented and now commercialisation is being pursued by QCV (qcvictoria.com ).
Email: jrabeau @ gmail.com
Torsten Gaebel
Torsten recently completed his PhD research at the University of Stuttgart, Germany under the supervision of Professor Joerg Wrachtrup and Dr Fedor Jelezko. He has published a number of articles in world leading journals in the area of diamond quantum science. He currently holds a MQ Research Fellowship and is involved in projects using nanodiamond for single photon sources, magentometry and solids state quantum computing concepts.
Andrew Edmonds
Andy completed his PhD at the University of Warwick in 2008 under the supervision of Professor Mark Newton and with CASE award funding from the Diamond Trading Company, UK. His PhD research involved the use of Electron Paramagnetic Resonance to investigate point defects found in CVD diamond, particularly silicon-related defects as well as the nitrogen-vacancy centre.
Since 2008 he has been employed as a Post Doctoral research fellow in the Warwick University Node of the European Union Framework "EQUIND" project focused on the use of diamond for quantum information purposes.
Carlo Bradac
Carlo is a PhD candidate. His project is on the use of nanodiamonds for nano-scale magentometry and single spin detection. Carlo joined the group in August 2008.
Faraz Ahmed
Faraz is a PhD candidate. He is studying enhanced spontaneous emission in nanodiamond emitters using plasmonics and cavities. The work consists of a range of theoretical and experimental techniques. Faraz joined the group in September 2009.
Jana Say
Jana is a MQRES PhD candidate. You can find her either in the optics lab working on nanodiamond imaging or in the CBMS (Chemistry and Bimolecular Sciences) lab working on bio-functionalisation. She graduated from the University of British Columbia with her undergraduate in Physics in 2009 and joined our team in March 2010. Jana is very excited to be back at Macquarie after completing an exchange here during her undergraduate.
Shaneel Chandra
Shaneel is a PhD student working under joint supervision between ICS and CBMS (Chemistry & Biomolecular Sciences) to develop diamond-coated small electrodes for in vivo determination of the neurotransmitter dopamine. The project deals with minimizing electrode fouling (a significant challenge to in vivo work) by proteins in the brain fluid. A micrometer film of nano crystalline diamond on the electrode surface may enhance the electrode's selectivity towards dopamine.
Past group members
Yan-Hua Zhai
Yan-Hua Zhai recently joined our group as a postdoc from China. In 2001, Yan-Hua received her B. S. degree in physics from Liaocheng University and 3 years later, her M. S. degree in quantum optics from Beijing Normal University , where her supervisor was Prof. Kaige Wang. Dr Zhai then completed her PhD degree study at the Institue of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) under the supervision of Prof. Ling-An Wu. During her M.S. studies, her research work was mainly theoretical and focused on how to quantify entanglement in a pure bipartite system, as well as how to characterize two-photon interference at a beam splitter. Her Ph. D research project was on the experimental realization of two-photon interference with thermal light, "ghost" imaging with true thermal light, and absolute self-calibration of the quantum efficiency of single-photon detectors. Now she is undertaking experimental work relating to single photon sources in diamond. Email: yzhai@ics.mq.edu.au
Nishen Naidoo
Nishen is a post-doctoral fellow and currently employed under the Macquarie University Research Innovation scheme. He is focusing his efforts on developing techniques for treating and attaching nanodiamonds to bio-molecules. Nishen completed his PhD in protein biophysics at Macquarie in 2006, and recently completed a post-doctoral position at the University of New South Wales.