Quantum Information Seminar Series: Ksenia Dolgaleva

Abstract:

Local electric field, driving the atomic transition in an optical material is, in general, different from the macroscopic field in the medium. It contains the contributions from the fields of the surrounding atoms or molecules. An even more interesting situation arises in case of nanocomposite optical materials, which are nanoscale mixtures of two or more homogeneous constituents, where the morphology can significantly modify the local field. In this talk, I will discuss how local-field effects and nanostructuring can be utilized for manipulating the optical properties of nanocomposite materials. I will also talk about some opportunities that local-field effects offer in the nonlinear optical regime. Among those is, for example, the microscopic cascaded contribution of the lower-order nonlinearities to the higher-order nonlinear response. There can exists new phenomena that local-field effects are yet to offer, and research in this field can bring up many practical applications.