Clivia M. Sotomayor Torres

Clivia M. Sotomayor Torres

Institut Català de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia

Engineering Sciences

Clivia obtained her PhD in Physics (Manchester Univ., UK 1984). She held tenured appointments at St. Andrews and Glasgow Universities and became a C4 professor at Wuppertal Univ. (Germany 1996). During 2004-8 she was a research professor at Univ. College Cork, Tyndall National Institute (Ireland). Since 2007 she is at ICN2 and heads a 17-strong team working on phonon engineering and nanofabrication. Clivia received awards from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Nuffield Foundation and an Amelia Earhart Fellowship from ZONTA International (USA).  She is author of over 500 scientific papers, of which 462 are indexed (WoS, Researcher ID: E-8418-2010), has an h-index of 46 and almost 9000 citations. She edited six books on low dimensional structures and nanofabrication. She was a guest professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden for five years until September last year.


Research interests

Her group investigates new concepts for multi-state variables based on the engineered interactions of phonons with photons, electrons and magnons, in device-like structures. One particular interest is thermal transport at the nanoscale to address heat dissipation in nanoelectronics, the role of phonons in noise and dissipation in nano-scale systems. Another strand is Si-based opto-mechanics for phonon-based information processing.  Our experimental research is anchored in novel nanofabrication methods including dimensional and defectivity metrology. The latter is essential to set up standards in manufacturing to ease the uptake of nanotechnology products. During 2019 we made considerable progress in experiments with topological bosons aiming at dissipationless energy transport.

Selected publications

– Sledzinska M, Graczykowski B, Maire J, Chavez-Angel E, Sotomayor-Torres CM & Alzina F 2019, ‘2D Phononic Crystals: Progress and Prospects in Hypersound and Thermal Transport Engineering’, Advanced Functional Materials, , 1904434.

– Jaramillo-Fernandez J, Whitworth GL, Pariente JA, Blanco A, Garcia PD, Lopez C &  Sotomayor-Torres CM 2019, ‘A Self-Assembled 2D Thermofunctional Material for Radiative Cooling‘, Small, 15, 22, 1905290.

– Arregui G, Lanzillotti-Kimura ND, Sotomayor-Torres CM & Garcia PD 2019, ‘Anderson Photon-Phonon Colocalization in Certain Random Superlattices’, Physical Review Letters, 122, 4, 043903.

– Arregui G, Ortiz O, Esmann M, Sotomayor-Torres CM, Gomez-Carbonell C, Mauguin O, Perrin B, Lemaitre A, Garcia PD & Lanzillotti-Kimura ND 2019, ‘Coherent generation and detection of acoustic phonons in topological nanocavities’, APL Photonics, 4, 3, 030805.

– Sledzinska M, Graczykowski B, Alzina F, Melia T, Termentzidis K, Lacroix D & Sotomayor Torres CM 2019, ‘Thermal conductivity in disordered porous nanomembranes’, Nanotechnology, 30, 26, 265401.

– Colombano MF, Arregui G, Capuj N E, Pitanti A, Maire J, Griol A, Garrido B, Martinez A, Sotomayor-Torres CM & Navarro-Urrios D 2019, ‘Synchronization of Optomechanical Nanobeams by Mechanical Interaction‘, Physical Review Letters, 123, 017402


Selected research activities

Scientific Advisor to the Research Centre Silicon Austria Lab.

Board Member Danish National Research Foundation.

EU FET Open project coordinator “All-phononic circuits enabled by opto-mechanics” (PHENOMEN).

Member of the Experts Committee for the Excellence Strategy of German Universities.