Linear-, Nonlinear- and Hydrodynamics in Quantum Materials.

Today, we imagine a world where we can engineer materials and devices atom-by-atom. Exciting discoveries during the past few decades in quantum science and technology have brought us to this next step in the quantum revolution: the ability to fabricate, image and measure materials and their properties at the level of single atoms is almost within our grasp. Yet, at the most fundamental level a tractable quantum mechanical description and understanding of these materials does not exist. The physics of quantum materials is rich with spectacular excited-state and non-equilibrium effects, but many of these phenomena remain poorly understood and consequently technologically unexplored. Therefore, my research focuses on understanding how quantum-engineered materials behave, particularly away from equilibrium, and how we can harness these effects for technologies of the future. I will present my approach, from a theoretical and computational standpoint, in this seminar. I will show recent results using newly developed theoretical methods to evaluate the linear optical properties of low dimensional and heterostructured quantum materials. Further I will discuss how we extend these methods as a computational probe of hydrodynamic materials, for which electronic transport behaves according to the laws of hydrodynamics over conventional scattering descriptions. Finally, I will show the linear and nonlinear optical properties of these hydrodynamic and other similar Dirac and Weyl compounds to better understand the effect of linear dispersion on overall transport and optical properties.