Quick Facts
VirgoBiography
Prof. Ivan Georgiev Petrov (Bulgarian: Иван Георгиев Петров) (b. 6 September 1949, Shumen, Bulgaria) is Bulgarian physicist, specializing in thin films, surface science, and methods of characterization of materials .
He is the current president of the American Vacuum Society.
Biography
Ivan Petrov was born in 1949 in Shumen. He studied physics at the University of Sofia and earn his PhD from the Institute of Electronics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 1986.
In 1989 he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where he has been a professor since 1998. From 1998 until 2010 he was the director of the Center for Microanalysis of Materials at the Seitz Materials Research Laboratory.
Between 2000 and 2012 has was an adjunct professor at the Materials and Engineering Research Institute in Sheffield Hallam University in England. Since 2009 he is an adjunct professor in Linköping University in Sweden, where he was awarded a honoris causa.
In 2014 he was elected as the president of AVS for 2015.
He is chair of the Surface Engineering Division of IUVSTA.
Research
Ivan's research elucidated the ways to obtain high-quality thin films, at low substrate temperatures, from refractory materials, such as transition metal nitrides, through the use of high-fluxes of low-energy ions.
He co-authored the seminal papers on High-power impulse magnetron sputtering (HIPIMS) which demonstrated that this technique produces highly ionized metal fluxes and opened additional ways to manipulate films properties.
He is an author on over 250 publications and has over 10 000 citations.
Awards
- 2009 – R&D100 by R&D Magazine as a co-inventor of the TEAM electron microscopy stage
- 2009 – Bunshah Award and Honorary Lecture from AVS for "Development of a detailed understanding of the role of low-energy ion-irradiation on microstructural and texture evolution during transition metal nitride layer growth
- 2013 – John A. Thornton Memorial Award from AVS