Demler, Eugene

Date:   Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018
Time:   14:00
Place:   ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg, HCI D 8
Host:    Atac Imamoglu

Nonlinear optics with collective modes: phonons, excitons, and the Higgs excitation in a superconductor

Eugene Demler
Harvard University, USA

Over the last few years, the efforts to create materials with new properties have been extended from the search for new chemical substances to the manipulation of material properties in the time domain. This talk will discuss the idea of using collective modes to produce Floquet engineering of optical properties of materials. As a concrete example I will show that dynamical modulation of the superfluid density arising from the Higgs excitation of a superconductor can be used to amplify light. This process is analogous to parametric amplification in non-linear optics, but has the advantage of having an intrinsic strong coupling between the collective modes and light. Similar phenomena for phonons and excitons will be discussed.