Harvard Physics Colloquium Tea & Colloquium Talk
Date and Time
Location
Virtual Tea will begin at 4:00pm
Colloquium Talk will begin at 4:30pm
Professor Matteo Mitrano (Harvard University)
Controlling quantum materials with light
Modern condensed matter physics is increasingly focused on materials exhibiting macroscopic quantum-mechanical effects (“quantum materials”) and on ways to manipulate their electronic properties. Ultrafast optical excitation, especially when resonant to specific lattice modes, has recently emerged as a powerful mean to induce new functionalities in quantum materials and to control their properties. A most ambitious goal is to selectively drive structural or electronic degrees of freedom to bring about nonequilibrium superconductivity at temperatures far above the thermodynamic critical temperature Tc. In this talk, I will discuss how midinfrared optical excitation led to transient superconductivity above the equilibrium Tc in cuprates and molecular solids. I will then show how time-resolved x-ray scattering methods can provide new insights into the charge, spin and lattice response of these light-driven states of matter.