Contact Information
gougousi@umbc.edu
410-455-6874
Physics, Rm 317
Title
Professor
Education
Ph.D. Physics – University of Pittsburgh, 1996
M.Sc. Physics – University of Pittsburgh, 1993
B.S. Physics – Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, GREECE, 1990
Previous Experience
Dr. Gougousi joined UMBC after postdoctoral appointments at North Carolina State University and the University of Maryland College Park.
Professional Interests
My research focuses on nanostructured materials, thin films, and interfaces. As modern devices continue to shrink toward the atomic scale, surfaces and interfaces often become the key factors that determine performance. Understanding how these interfaces form, evolve, and influence material behavior is one of the central challenges in advanced materials science.
My group studies how thin films and other low-dimensional materials grow, and how their structure affects their properties. Over the years, our work has included dielectrics, semiconductors, photonic materials, and two-dimensional materials such as transition metal dichalcogenides. We use both chemical methods, including Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD), and physical vapor deposition techniques to grow materials on a wide range of substrates and to study their structural, electronic, and optical behavior.
A major emphasis of our research is Atomic Layer Deposition, a method for building materials one atomic layer at a time. ALD offers exceptional control over thickness, composition, and morphology, and can produce smooth, uniform, conformal coatings even on complex three-dimensional surfaces. What makes ALD especially powerful is that film growth occurs through alternating surface reactions that are self-limiting and repeatable. Because the process depends strongly on surface chemistry, it can also be used for selective deposition. This opens new possibilities for bottom-up fabrication of nanoscale structures and for designing materials with tailored functionality.
Atomic layer deposition permits atomic level of the film thickness and morphology and achieves very smooth, uniform, conformal films even on very high aspect ratio structures. Although ALD is usually thought of as a modified version of Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD), it exhibits some unique features: film formation is achieved by alternating exposure of a surface to the vapor of two chemical reagents that react in a complementary, self-limiting manner. Complementary means that each of the two reagents must prepare the surface for reaction with the other chemical so the process is cyclical. The dependence of the deposition on favorable surface chemistry can be exploited to achieve selective deposition that is the basis of the so-called “bottom-up” approaches for the formation of nanostructures.
Publications
Theodosia Gougousi’s publications and citations (Google Scholar)
