The Division of Materials Research and the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure contribute funds to this CAREER award. This award supports an integrated research and education effort on developing and applying computational methods for understanding how nonlinear optical materials respond to light. How nonlinear optical materials respond to light depends on the intensity of the light which leads to interesting phenomena that can be used in technological applications. For example, the dependence of the index of refraction on light intensity can cause a nonlinear optical material to function like a lens causing a light beam to narrow or collapse as it passes through the material. These materials have applications in, for example, noninvasive imaging for medicine, optoelectronic devices, and advanced sensitive quantum mechanical sensors. Understanding and accurate prediction of strong light-matter interaction at microscopic level would help enable the design of novel materials with tailored nonlinear optical properties for specific applications.
The goal of this project is to develop and apply methods that starting from knowing the identity of the constituent atoms to predict how specific nonlinear optical materials will respond to light. Emphasis will be placed on novel two-dimensional materials and topological materials which can have metallic states with exotic properties that cover surfaces and edges of the material. This work will elucidate the fundamental role of symmetry, topology, surface/edge, and spin-orbit coupling in nonlinear light-matter interactions. The results obtained from this work will also help generate design principles for nonlinear optical materials and nanostructures. The methods and data acquired will be broadly disseminated to the scientific community, industry, and the general public through open-source distributions.
To integrate outreach and education with the research, the PI will host and train high-school students from under-represented groups and secondary school teachers in scientific computing and simulations during summers. The PI will also integrate the research into undergraduate and graduate curricula, provide multidisciplinary training to undergraduate and graduate students, disseminate computational tools in computational materials science summer schools, and promote women in materials science and engineering through seminar series. The graduate students working on this project will acquire an interdisciplinary background in physics, materials science, and high-performance computing. The computer codes and data generated will be shared with the public to benefit the education and outreach in the community.
The Division of Materials Research and the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure contribute funds to this CAREER award. This award supports an integrated research and education effort on developing and applying predictive first-principles methods for understanding nonlinear optical responses of materials. Materials and nanostructures with tailored nonlinear optical properties are not only important for understanding, probing, and ultimately controlling light-matter interaction at the nanoscale, but highly desirable for many applications such as ultrafast nonlinear optics, biosensing, all-optical transistor and computer, and optical quantum teleportation, communication, and computing. Recently, giant nonlinear optical processes such as second and third harmonic generation were discovered in two-dimensional crystals and topological materials, which challenges the current understanding and requires fundamental investigation at the microscopic level.
The goal of this project is to advance fundamental understanding and theoretical prediction of nonlinear light-matter interaction in materials. The research will focus on developing and applying first-principles density-functional-based methods and approaches to investigate and eventually predict second and third order nonlinear optical responses of materials. Spin-orbit coupling, crystalline symmetry, causality, electron-hole interaction, quasiparticle energy, and quasiparticle lifetime due to carrier-carrier and carrier-phonon interactions will be included in this first-principles theoretical framework. Particular emphasis will be placed on elucidating the role of symmetry, electronic topology, surface/edge, and spin-orbit coupling in two-dimensional materials and topological materials. The results obtained will generate new knowledge of nonlinear optical processes and contribute materials design principles for control of light-matter interactions.
To integrate outreach and education with the research, the PI will host and train high-school students from under-represented groups and secondary school teachers in scientific computing and simulations during summers to motivate the aspiration and curiosity of the students in science and engineering. The PI will also integrate the research into undergraduate and graduate curricula, provide multidisciplinary training to undergraduate and graduate students, disseminate the developed computational tools in computational materials science summer schools, and promote women in materials science and engineering through seminar series. The graduate students working on this project will acquire a solid interdisciplinary background in physics, materials science, and high-performance computing. In addition, the computational methods, codes, and data generated from this project will be broadly disseminated to the scientific community, the industry, and the general public through open-source distributions with the intent to benefit the broader research, education, and outreach in the community.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
