Rate My Professor Siddharth Karkare

Siddharth Karkare is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at Arizona State University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India, and a PhD in physics from Cornell University in 2015 under the advisement of Professor Ivan Bazarov. From 2015 to 2018, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with Howard Padmore, advancing research in accelerator physics at its intersection with nanoscience. Karkare joined Arizona State University in 2018 as an Assistant Professor and was later promoted to Associate Professor. He leads the Photoemission and Bright Beams Lab and serves as theme coordinator for the Beam Production Research Theme at the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Center for Bright Beams.

Karkare’s research specializes in high-brightness electron sources, focusing on photoemission from novel materials and photocathodes to produce brighter electron beams for X-ray lasers, electron microscopes, and particle colliders. His efforts have secured major funding, including a $300,000 grant from the Department of Energy in 2020 to develop intense electron sources using new materials and nanometer-scale light manipulation, and approximately $1.25 million from a Center for Bright Beams renewal award, building on a previous $1.5 million allocation. Notable publications include “Ultracold Electrons via Near-Threshold Photoemission from Single-Crystal Cu(100)” in Physical Review Letters (2020), “Theory of photoemission from cathodes with disordered surfaces” in Journal of Applied Physics (2023), “Ion-Beam-Assisted Growth of Cesium-antimonide Photocathodes” in Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology B (2023), “A cryogenically cooled 200 kV DC photoemission electron gun for ultralow emittance photocathodes” in Review of Scientific Instruments (2023), and “Physically and chemically smooth cesium-antimonide photocathodes on single crystal strontium titanate substrates” in Applied Physics Letters (2022). Karkare’s work significantly impacts accelerator science, enabling advanced imaging and scientific discovery across disciplines.