This award supports an integrated research, education, and outreach program in theoretical condensed matter and materials physics. One of the major goals of modern physics is to discover and engineer new materials with useful properties. The conventional approach to material discovery often involves the trial and error method of examining various electronic compounds in the search of desirable functionalities. This project puts forward a new paradigm for functional material design by combining the rich physics of electrons in solids with laser physics and the optics toolbox.
The goal of the project is to put together the theoretical foundation of the nascent field of light-matter coupled materials, where material properties could be tuned at will by controlling the optical environment and/or coupling of electronic, magnetic, and sound modes in solid-state materials to light. Of particular interest are so-called quantum fluids of light, where part-matter and part-light particles form a unique state called a Bose-Einstein condensate. In Bose-Einstein condensates, all constituent particles flow in unison without friction. Another related example of research, supported by this award, is light-induced superconductivity. Superconductivity is a Bose-Einstein condensate of charged particles, which forms in some metals at low temperatures. In this state, electrons flow without any resistance and can indefinitely sustain currents and magnetic fields. Superconductors are of outmost importance to various technologies, from their ubiquitous use in magnetic resonance imaging machines to components of magnetically levitating trains to ultra-sensitive magnetic sensors to superconducting quantum bits in various quantum computing architectures. However, their usefulness is often limited by prohibitively low temperatures, where superconductivity usually emerges. This project will develop novel approaches to enhancing superconductivity to higher temperatures by coupling superconducting materials to light.
The research activity will go hand in hand with an education and outreach program, which is an integral part of this award. The program will involve mentoring high-school students from the Washington, DC area's magnet schools and organizing events and competitions in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. PI's prior high-school advisees have won national awards with PI's research projects and successfully participated in the international physics Olympiads. The PI will continue this successful mentoring program. The PI will also involve students from the historically black colleges and universities in the Washington, DC area. Apart from this, a quality massive open online course on condensed matter physics will be developed with an eye on exposing the students to research in quantum science and material physics. The PI has previously developed such a course on graduate quantum physics, which has been taken by more than 100,000 students worldwide. The broader impacts of all these activities will be early exposure of young talented students to cutting edge research, which will help attract students to careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Finally, this award will support recruiting and advising undergraduate students, graduate and postdoctoral researchers from underrepresented backgrounds to participate in condensed matter and materials research.
This award supports an integrated research, education, and outreach program in theoretical condensed matter and materials physics. The emphasis is on relating exciting theoretical results and ideas to experiment and communicating them to a broad audience. The research part of the project is motivated by significant new theoretical and experimental developments and is devoted to theoretical studies of strongly-correlated electron systems interacting with quantum light. The research will focus on:
1. Strongly-correlated polariton matter. Exciton-polaritons are part-light, part-matter quantum quasiparticles, resulting from strong light-matter coupling in a combined structure of semiconductor quantum wells and cavity photons. The PI will develop a generalization of this polaritonic matter in strongly-correlated quantum materials, by hybridizing collective modes of the interacting electron systems with light.
2. Cavity-enhanced superconductivity. It has been long known that subjecting a superconductor to external classical radiation can lead to an enhancement of superconductivity in it. The PI will explore quantum generalization of these phenomena, by considering a superconductor interacting with a photon field in optical cavities with an eye on experimentally relevant protocols for cavity-induced enhancement of superconductivity.
3. Peierls superradiance. Peierls transition is a spontaneous distortion of a crystal lattice driven by electronic correlations in one-dimensional systems. By exploiting an analogy between the electron-phonon coupling in solids and matter-light coupling in optical cavities, the PI will explore the possibility of spontaneous formation of "photon crystals" driven by a photonic analogue of the Peierls effect.
The research activity will go hand in hand with an education and outreach program, which is an integral part of this award. The program will involve mentoring high-school students from the Washington, DC area's magnet schools and organizing events and competitions in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. PI's prior high-school advisees have won national awards with PI's research projects and successfully participated in the international physics Olympiads. The PI will continue this successful mentoring program. The PI will also involve students from the historically black colleges and universities in the Washington, DC area. Apart from this, a quality massive open online course on condensed matter physics will be developed with an eye on exposing the students to research in quantum science and material physics. The PI has previously developed such a course on graduate quantum physics, which has been taken by more than 100,000 students worldwide. The broader impacts of all these activities will be early exposure of young talented students to cutting edge research, which will help attract students to careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Finally, this award will support recruiting and advising undergraduate students, graduate and postdoctoral researchers from underrepresented backgrounds to participate in condensed matter and materials research.
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.
