Infrared Light Control in Materials at the Nanoscale

Control of light at the nanoscale will provide in the near future new devices ranging from bio-sensing to quantum nanophotonics. It is of paramount importance to find materials that can easily absorb light by creating an excitation of the compound that lives for a long time and does not decay. Exciting phonons, atomic vibrations of the crystal lattice, with infrared light has been shown recently as a very promising direction: phononic excitations may be strongly long-lived in layered materials and may even provide hyperbolic dispersions.

In this project we propose to work on the calculation of the interaction of infrared light with the phonons of some interesting candidate materials using theoretical first-principles calculations, that is, without parametrizing the interaction of electrons and ions in the material that determines the optical properties.