| Peter Barker | |
| Birth Date: | 1967 |
| Birth Place: | Australia |
| Fields: | Physicist |
| Workplaces: | University College London |
| Alma Mater: | University of Queensland |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop |
| Website: | https://www.ucl.ac.uk/physics-astronomy/people/professor-peter-barker |
Peter Barker (born 1967) is an Australian-born British physicist.
Barker obtained his PhD in Physics in 1996 from the University of Queensland Australia under the supervision of Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop. From 1997 to 2000 he was postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Princeton University in the US. From 2001 to 2006 he was a Lecturer at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh in the UK. He held an EPSRC Research Fellowship from 2005–2010. In 2006, he moved to University College London as Reader and became a Professor in 2007.[1]
He was the head of the Atomic, Molecular, Optical and Positron Physics group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London (UCL). He has a strong background in cold atomic and molecular physics. Since 2005, his research has concentrated on the cooling, manipulation and transport of atoms, molecules and nanoparticles in optical tweezers.[2] In 2017, he began to explore experimental approaches to create a micron-sized fridge using optical refrigeration of a submicrometre crystal suspended in optical and ion traps.[3] He has over 80 articles published with high impact publications in Nature Physics, Nature Photonics, Nature Nanotechnology and Physical Review Letters.[4]