Fall 2019

Cyclotron resonance—the resonant absorption of light by charge carriers in a strong magnetic field—is widely used to measure the effective band mass of (semi-)conducting materials. This works because the CR absorption in systems having a parabolic dispersion—a reasonable description of most materials—is unaffected by inter-particle interactions. An intriguing corollary is that, for instance, in high-mobility GaAs heterostructures when the electronic transport shows remarkably complex behavior in the fractional quantum Hall regime, there is still only a single cyclotron resonance peak that...

In this talk I will illustrate how quantum-mechanical modeling of materials at the atomic scale plays an important role in solar energy research, and how it can be used to design and realize entirely new materials. After an introduction to solar photovoltaics, I will discuss the emergence of perovskite solar cells during the past few years, and explain why this family of materials has attracted so much interest in the scientific community. One of the outstanding challenges in perovskite research is to find new lead-free materials with optoelectronic properties comparable to lead-based...

Machine learning and artificial intelligence applications in science and engineering have received rapidly increasing hype over the last several  years, with Citrine on the front lines of adoption of ML and AI in materials development. In this talk, I will discuss opportunities, open challenges, and recent work in materials informatics drawn from experiences on a wide range of commercial and noncommercial projects, including:

• data    reuse    with    transfer    learning,
• design    of    experiments    with    active    learning,
• domain    knowledge    
...

A group of students from the Taylor Allerdice High School will be visiting the University of Pittsburgh on December 17, 2019 to tour the Levy, Hatridge, Frolov, and Dutt labs in the Department of Physics and get a sneak peek of quantum mechanics in action!

The ability to efficiently separate, recombine, and direct charge carriers is central to a wide range of applications, including electronics, photovoltaics, displays and solid-state lighting. Engineering band structure and heterointerfaces with atomic precision is an obvious route to achieving such capabilities. To do so through widely-accessible and cost-effective means is not. But such a means would allow rapid advances in these critical application areas. The evolution of colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals from single-composition, “spherical” particles to complex heterostructures of...

Two-mode squeezed light sources exhibiting continuous variable entanglement allow us to reduce the noise floor in optically transduced sensors below the standard quantum limit, enabling greater signal to noise ratios than are possible in the best possible classical sensors.  I will present some of our recent results demonstrating quantum enhanced sensitivity for applications ranging from magnetometry to plasmonic sensing to atomic force microscopy. I will also discuss some of our recent research efforts exploring quantum nanophotonics with plasmonic nanostructures and single photon...

A key feature of quantum physics is the existence of superpositions of single and many-particle quantum states, usually referred to as quantum coherence and entanglement respectively.  Famously, these aspects of quantum theory were also characterized by Einstein as "spooky" and caused him to reject many of its predictions. However, these principles are by now so well established that they have actually become tools in the growing field of quantum information science and technology to realize new paradigms for secure communication, enhanced computation, and precision sensing. 

While...

Additive manufacturing (AM), known as 3D Printing, has given rise to powerful capabilities for converting 3D digital models into physical objects. The valuable features of AM include the ability to build parts with tailored properties for custom applications, the high efficiency of material utilization, and the unprecedented flexibility for fabricating complex or intricated structures that cannot be made by traditional manufacturing processes. 

AM has been over 30 years old since its inception, and yet the technology is still a frontier with unexplored potentials partly due to the...