Angel Rubio: Joint Quantum Seminar

Quantum Cavaties and Floquet Materials Engineering from first Priciples QEDFT

An appealing and challenging route towards engineering materials with specific properties is to find ways of designing or selectively manipulate materials, especially at the quantum level. We will provide an overview of how well-established concepts in the fields of quantum chemistry and materials have to be adapted when the quantum nature of light becomes important. We will pursue the question whether it is possible to create these new states of materials as groundstates of the system. To this end we will show how the emerging (vaccum) dressed states resembles Floquet states in driven systems. A particular appeal of light dressing is the possibility to engineer symmetry breaking which can lead to novel properties of materials, e.g coupling to circularly polarized photons leads to local breaking of time-reversal symmetry enabling the control over a large variety of materials properties (e.g.topology). We show that the new quantum electrodynamics density-functional formalism (QEDFT) can account for those effects. We illustrate the realization of those ideas in molecular complexes and 2D materials.

Biography:

Angel Rubio, born on 27 September 1965 in Oviedo, Spain, is the Director of the Theory Department of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter. He is also  Distinguish Research Scientist at the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute (NY, USA) and Professor/Chair for condensed matter physics at the University of the Basque Country in Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain. He received his PhD in Physics in 1991 from the University of Valladolid.. He worked as post-doctoral researcher at University of California at Berkeley (1992-94). He is External Scientific Member of the Fritz Haber Institute  in Berlin and Full Professor at the University of Hamburg  (2016). He is acknowledged as pioneer and leader in the area of computational materials physics and one of the founders of modern “theoretical spectroscopy” and the originator of the widely used ab initio open-source project Octopus. Recently his research has focussed on the prediction and characterization of new  non-equilibrium states of matterHis work  has been recognized by several awards, including the 2018 Max Born medal and prize, 2016 Medal of the Spanish Royal Physical Society, the 2014 Premio Rey Jaime I for basic research, the 2006 DuPont Prize in nanotechnology, the 2005 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Humboldt Foundation, and two European Research Council advanced grants (2011 and 2016).  Rubio is Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, member of the Academia Europaea, and a foreign associate member of the National Academy of Sciences.