Event



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: "Quantum optics meets correlated electrons"

Mohammad Hafezi, University of Maryland
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One of the key challenges in the development of quantum technologies is the control of light-matter interaction at the quantum level where individual excitations matter. During the past couple of decades, there has been tremendous progress in controlling individual photons and other excitations such as spin, excitonic, phononic in solid-state systems. Such efforts have been motivated to develop quantum technologies such as quantum memories, quantum transducers, quantum networks, and quantum sensing. While these efforts have been mainly focused on control and manipulation of individual excitations (i.e., single-particle physics), both desired and undesired many-body effects have become important. Therefore,  it is intriguing to explore whether these quantum optical control techniques could pave a radically new way to prepare, manipulate, and detect non-local and correlated electronic states, such as topological ones. In this talk, I discuss several theoretical ideas : (1) Floquet engineering of effective interaction, in contrast to Floquet band engineering, both in the context of fractional quantum Hall effect and superconductivity. (2) Enhancing superconductivity through light-matter coupling: using an optical drive, an empty cavity, plasmon-polaritons, or squeezed drive.