Peter Moroshkin grew up in the city of St Petersburg (before 1991 Leningrad) in Russia (before 1991 USSR) and received his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD degrees from St. Petersburg State University, department of Optics and Spectroscopy. His Master’s and PhD work in the field of resonant light-matter interaction was supervised by Prof. Valentin Egorov and Dr. Igor Chekhonin. That work was focused on the propagation of short laser pulses in a resonantly absorbing atomic gas and on the effect of parametric light amplification in such optically dense resonant media. Part of the PhD project was carried out at the Institute for Low Temperature Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany.
In June 2003, upon receiving his PhD, Peter left his Alma Mater and joined the group of Prof. Antoine Weis in the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. There he stayed for 8 years, first as a postdoc and then as a senior assistant. During this time Peter was working on a very exotic system – foreign atoms and molecules embedded into solid helium matrices at cryogenic temperatures and high pressures. The project was initiated back in early 1990s, as an attempt to search for a permanent electric dipole moment of an electron using high-precision spectroscopy measurements of the Stark effect in cesium atoms immobilized in solid He. Since 2006 the focus has shifted towards the laser spectroscopy studies of so-called atomic bubbles - impurity centers in quantum fluids and solids. In October 2009 Peter received a Habilitation degree in physics with a thesis entitled “Atomic and molecular defects in solid He”.
At the end of 2011, with the end of the solid helium project, Peter moved to Germany and joined the group of Prof. Martin Weitz at the University of Bonn. This time, it was all about laser spectroscopy at very high temperatures, even higher pressures, and atomic collisions in a gas (Ar, He) whose density approaches that of a liquid.
Peter returned back to the field of quantum fluids and solids and to the laser spectroscopy of impurity atoms in liquid helium in April 2013, when he landed in Japan and joined the research group of Prof. Kimitoshi Kono at RIKEN. He developed methods for the injection of electrically charged impurity particles (ions) and for their trapping under the free surface of superfluid helium.
As of April 2018, Peter has moved to Okinawa and is currently collaborating with Yui Kubo on the spectroscopy of impurity centers in diamond at low temperatures.
