Colloquium: Strong light-matter interaction in van der Waals materials
Colloquium: Strong light-matter interaction in van der Waals materialsDr. Vinod Menon
Vinod Menon Professor & Chair
Dept. of Physics, Center for Discovery and Innovation
City College of New York
ABSTRACT: Strong light-matter coupling results in the formation of half-light half-matter quasiparticles called polaritons that take on the properties of both its constituents. I will first introduce the concept of strong coupling in condensed matter systems including a historical overview of the topic. Following this, I will discuss the formation of exciton polaritons (EPs) in van der Waals materials [1]. Specifically, their nonlinear interactions and potential to realize “photon blockade” using Rydberg excitons [2] and dipolar excitons [3] will be addressed. I will then discuss the use of strain to control exciton flow and nonlinear response [4]. Finally, I will present some recent results on EPs in correlated van der Waals materials and their potential to realize hybridization between excitons, photons and magnons [5].
[1] X. Liu et al., Nat. Photonics9, 30 (2015).
[2] J. Gu et al., Nat. Commun.12, 2269 (2021).
[3] B. Datta et al., ArXiv 2110.13326 (2021).
[4] F. Dirnberger et al., Sci. Adv. 7, 3066 (2021).
[5] F. Dirnberger et al.ArXiv 2203.06129 (2022).
BIO: Vinod Menon is a Professor of Physics and currently the Chair of the Physics Department at the City College of New York and doctoral faculty at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is a fellow of Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America) and an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer in Photonics (2018-2020). He joined CUNY in fall 2004 as part of the initiative in photonics. Prior to joining CUNY he was at Princeton University (2001-2004) where he was the Lucent Bell Labs Post-Doctoral Fellow in Photonics. He received his MSc in Physics (Quantum Optics) from the University of Hyderabad, India in 1995 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Massachusetts in 2001. He has held visiting positions at MIT, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, and Princeton University. He also serves on the editorial board of Optica, an OSA journal.
TITLE: Strong light-matter interaction in van der Waals materials
DATE: March 28, 2022
TIME: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM (EST)
LOCATION: ZOOM or GOERGEN 101 (SLOAN AUDITORIUM)