Light scattering in nanoparticles

In this specific project, we will study how light interacts with a nanoparticle. The comprehension of the effect is an essential task for several subfields of physics that go from biophysics to astrophysics. In our group, we are interested in studying the phenomena from the fundamental perspective to capture the essential details and apply the conclusions in all knowledge areas.

For a sphere, this problem presents an analytical solution, known as Mie Scattering. However, due to the solution's nature, we have the necessity of implementing it numerically. For more complicated geometries to analyze these light-matter interactions we will use a home-made numerical code known as Discrete Dipole Approximation (DDA).

The student's tasks involve understanding the scattering of an electromagnetic plane wave when illuminated by a homogeneous sphere and more complicated structures and the numerical implementation of the appropriate codes in python. The student will also get familiar with the streamlit library, a popular library used in data science to share dashboards.

This theoretical project combines electrodynamics, mathematical methods, and computational physics.