Rate My Professor Sergey Suchalkin

Sergey Suchalkin serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the design and development of optoelectronic devices, including far- and mid-infrared lasers and detectors, mid-infrared semiconductor lasers, and physics of semiconductors and nanostructures. Prof. Suchalkin develops materials and devices for chemical sensing systems, such as low-cost rugged methane sensors for natural gas industry and rocketry applications, rapidly tunable lasers for high-accuracy chemical sensors in medicine, astronomy, and industry, and free-space optical FM communication systems including satellite applications. His work also includes new semiconductor nano-materials with high magnetic sensitivity, like InAsSb narrow gap semiconductors with graphene-like carrier dispersion and electron g-factors up to 104 times that of free electrons, for quantum information processing with topologically protected qubits based on Majorana fermions.

Using molecular beam epitaxy, Prof. Suchalkin's Optoelectronics Group fabricates devices such as electrically tunable quantum cascade lasers operating at ~10 μm, dual-color infrared LEDs where emission color depends on bias polarity for non-dispersive chemical sensors, and microcavity-enhanced Stark optical modulators for long-wave infrared. He co-holds five patents, receives funding from the National Science Foundation, Army Research Office, and industry, and collaborates with Army Research Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, and Georgia Institute of Technology. Prof. Suchalkin teaches ESE519: Semiconductor Lasers and Photodetectors and has taught a detailed general physics course for middle and high school students for more than ten years at SchoolNova at Stony Brook. His research outputs span from 1992, with key publications including "Minority carrier lifetime in type-2 InAs–GaSb strained-layer superlattices and bulk HgCdTe materials" (Applied Physics Letters, 2010), "Continuous wave operation of diode lasers at 3.36 μm at 12 °C" (Applied Physics Letters, 2008), "Type-I quantum well cascade diode lasers emitting near 3 μm" (Applied Physics Letters, 2013), "Giant g-factors and fully spin-polarized states in metamorphic short-period InAsSb/InSb superlattices" (Nature Communications, 2022), and "Semiconductor Laser with Electrically Modulated Frequency" (Photonics, 2025).