Project description
Removing the barriers to novel photonic devices
Topology is a branch of mathematics that investigates geometric shapes that withstand deformation, like a rubbery coffee mug that retains the hole in its handle no matter how you squash it. In the last few decades, topology has been successfully applied to materials. ‘Topologically protected’ electrons have led to topological insulators that are insulating on the inside and conducting on the outside, where electrons resist impediments to their flow. More recently, analogous phenomena with photons have been studied. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the TEBLA project is investigating emergent topological effects in photonic lattices that could lead to novel lasing phenomena and topological fluids of light.
Objective
Controlling and manipulating quantum matter is a fast-growing research topic that could revolutionise technology and influence many aspects of our daily life. A promising step in this direction is to use topological concepts to tune physical properties of matter and to exploit novel phenomena useful to build new physical devices. In the last decade, topology have been extensively studied in the context of quantum many-body systems, a revolution that has led to the discovery of the topological insulators. Similarly, the Fubini-Study metric has just begun to show its physical meaning and role played in some quantum phenomena, but a lot more remains to be investigated. In this Action, I will study how topological and geometrical effects emerge in the physics of bosons in lattices. I will first address the geometrical contribution in the dynamics of two-body bound states, and then I shall identify conditions for enhancing inter-particle interactions on a full many-body system. I will apply these findings on photonic lattice systems and investigate how non-trivial quantum geometry and topology can lead to novel lasing phenomena. The nature of the work, being based on a combination of expertise, will have a strong interdisciplinary character. The research will be done at Aalto University in the Quantum Dynamics group led by Academy Professor Päivi Törmä, with the unique and exciting opportunity for me to work on the theory in a side by side collaboration with the experimentalists of the group. The expected impact of this research will advance our understanding of the topological properties of bosons in lattices, towards the exploration of geometrically-induced ultrafast lasers and strongly correlated topological fluids of light.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural sciencesmathematicspure mathematicstopology
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesopticslaser physicsultrafast lasers
- natural sciencesphysical sciencestheoretical physicsparticle physicsphotons
You need to log in or register to use this function
We are sorry... an unexpected error occurred during execution.
You need to be authenticated. Your session might have expired.
Thank you for your feedback. You will soon receive an email to confirm the submission. If you have selected to be notified about the reporting status, you will also be contacted when the reporting status will change.
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
02150 Espoo
Finland