Description du projet
Concevoir des états quantiques électroniques dans les solides par interactions à plusieurs particules
Même si l’image du tout représentant davantage que la somme de ses parties a tout du cliché, elle n’en a pas moins de larges applications, et les états électroniques dans les solides semi-conducteurs ne font pas exception. Les interactions fortes entre de nombreuses particules sont très prometteuses pour concevoir artificiellement des états quantiques dans la matière condensée avec une vitesse et une fidélité sans précédent, au-delà de la portée des méthodes traditionnelles reposant sur les propriétés d’un électron unique. Le projet CoulENGINE, financé par l’UE, entend initier et développer une approche non invasive et basée sur la proximité pour créer et manipuler des structures électroniques dans des nanomatériaux en adaptant les interactions électrodynamiques de Coulomb sur des échelles de temps ultrarapides.
Objectif
Key phenomena in condensed matter are determined by the properties of the electronic states, strongly motivating the development of strategies for their artificial design. In semiconducting solids, heavily studied from fundamental and technological perspectives, electronic structures are currently defined using strong perturbations of the materials such as tuning the chemical composition, changing the geometry, or applying external fields. Traditional concepts, however, inherently rely on modifying single-particle properties of individual electrons, while the influence of many-particle interactions has been largely neglected in the context of bandstructure engineering so far. In addition, conventional methods start to approach intrinsic barriers in today’s technology, driving an intense search for fundamentally novel concepts.
Here, I propose to explore an alternative pathway to design and manipulate electronic states in matter that is exclusively based on many-particle interactions between electronic excitations mediated by Coulomb forces. These are exceptionally strong in two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors with a major impact on the energies of the electronic states, and are highly sensitive to the dielectric surroundings. Using layered heterostructures I intend to show how the dielectric environment of a 2D semiconductor can be tuned on ultrafast timescales by pulsed optical injection to manipulate electronic states via proximity screening. Similarly, external screening will be used to study how the geometry of proximate objects can be imprinted on the electronic structure of a 2D layer, creating dielectrically defined zero-, one-, and two-dimensional potentials in one unified system. Ultimately, the realization of rapidly tunable electronic quantum states through dielectric environment will offer novel, versatile experimental platforms for fundamental many-body physics research and establish a new approach for electronic structure engineering on the nanoscale.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantInstitution d’accueil
01069 Dresden
Allemagne