College of Arts and Sciences

Soft matter is a broad class of materials with many examples found in everyday life: foods, crude oil, many biological materials, granular materials, liquid crystals, plastics. All of these are unified by the property that they’re readily deformable because the elastic energy is of the same order of magnitude as the ambient thermal energy. Moreover, they spontaneously assemble into richly ordered structures that respond to many different kinds of external stimuli. Soft materials are therefore ideal candidates for advanced engineering applications including soft, biomimetic robots, self-building machines, shape-shifters, artificial muscles, new high-performance all-optical switches and chemical delivery packages. In each of these,

Continue reading… Of Bodies Changed to New Forms – Tim Atherton

The role of the surroundings, or environment, in quantum mechanics has long captivated physicists’ attention. Recently, quantum phase transitions (QPT)– a qualitative change in the ground state as a function of a parameter– have been shown to occur in systems coupled to a dissipative environment. Despite the ubiquity of QPTs in contemporary theoretical physics, obtaining clear experimental signatures has been challenging. I start by presenting a recent experiment in which it was possible to thoroughly characterize a QPT caused by coupling to an environment. The system is a single-molecule transistor built from a carbon nanotube quantum dot connected to strongly dissipative contacts.

Continue reading… Resonant Tunneling in a Dissipative Environment: Quantum Critical Behavior – Harold Baranger

onductor quantum dots (QDs) are a leading approach for the implementation of solid-state based qubits. In principle, either charge or spin can be used to encode a qubit. However, in the last ten years or so, a disproportionally large quantity of research has been devoted to spin qubits, mainly because of the relatively long single-qubit dephasing times for spin qubits. In this talk I present a sequence of experimental results on QD based charge qubits, demonstrating both one-qubit [1] and two-qubit [2] quantum logic operations. The finding of this research appears to go against the conventional wisdom that charge qubits are inferior in comparison to spin qubits for semiconducting materials.

Continue reading… Can Charge Qubits Compete with Spin Qubits for Quantum Information Processing? – HongWen Jiang

Despite living in a complex, room temperature, solid-state environment, the spin of electrons bound to a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) defect in diamond can exist in a delicate quantum superposition over relatively long timescales. The delicacy of this state makes the system exquisitely sensitive to perturbations in magnetic field, temperature, or strain. As such, the NV is a good candidate for sensing applications, providing precise measurements with sub-nanometer spatial resolution. The robust quantum coherence of the NV spin also suggests applications in quantum information processing: if we can engineer entangled states of many NV spins, then computation may be carried out in the unbelievably voluminous Hilbert space of this system,

Continue reading… Controlling Coherent Spins at the Nanoscale: Prospects for Practical Spin-Based Technology – Jesse Berezovsky

Organic (opto)electronic materials have been explored in a variety of applications in electronics and photonics. They offer several advantages over traditional silicon technology, including low-cost processing, fabrication of large-area flexible devices, and widely tunable properties through functionalization of the molecules. Over the past decade, remarkable progress in the material design has been made, which led to a considerable boost in performance of organic thin-film transistors, solar cells, and other applications that rely on (photo)conductive properties of the material. Nevertheless, the nature of photoexcitations, charge carrier photogeneration, and transport in organic semiconductors is not completely understood. In this presentation, I will summarize our efforts towards understanding photoinduced charge carrier dynamics in high-performance organic materials and towards development of novel,

Continue reading… Photophysics of Organic Materials: From Thin-Film Devices to Single Molecules and from Optoelectronics to Entomology – Oksana Ostroverkhova

On September 14, 2015 the two ground-based interferometers that comprise the LIGO network directly observed the gravitational-wave signature of a 1.3 billion-year-old binary black hole merger. This incredible discovery is not only the first direct detection of gravitational waves, which cements Einstein’s prediction of their existence, it is also the first ever observation of two black holes merging. Between the time of the detection and the time of the public announcement, the activity of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration was shrouded in secrecy in an effort to squash any premature rumors and conduct a thorough, unbiased analysis of the validity of this incredible finding.

Continue reading… Gravitational Waves Discovered: The Recent Detection of an Ancient Binary Black Hole Merger – Leslie E. Wade

Recent experiments at CWRU (Singer) have developed organic cavity polaritons that display world-record vacuum Rabi splittings of more than an eV.‭ ‬This ultrastrongly coupled polaritonic matter is a new regime for exploring non-linear optical effects.‭ ‬After an introduction to polariton physics, we‭ apply quantum optics theory to quantitatively determine various non-linear optical effects including types of‭ ‬low harmonic generation‭ (‬SHG and THG‭) ‬in single and double cavity polariton systems. We also point out potentially interesting physical questions/interpretations that this study raises. Ultrastrongly coupled photon-matter systems such as these may be the foundation for technologies including low-power optical switching and computing.

Continue reading… Non-Linear Optics of Ultrastrongly Coupled Cavity Polaritons – Mike Crescimanno

During the past 130 years the range of sizes and costs for scientific apparatus has expanded enormously. While some groundbreaking science is still done at modest cost, other experiments now require several billions of dollars to achieve their goals. A description of some significant milestones in the career of Albert Abraham Michelson illustrates how in this one individual’s life this divergence may have had its first exemplar, as his vision expanded beyond the exquisitely precise interferometer used in the Michelson-Morley experiment to the mile-long vacuum tube used in his later measurements of the speed of light.

Continue reading… Albert Michelson, the Michelson-Morley experiment, and the dichotomy between megaprojects and table-top science – Philip Taylor

In electromagnetism effects of the magnetic field are generally ignored. However in recent optical experiments intense magnetic light scattering has been observed as the result of a dynamic magneto-electric interaction that transcends the bounds of the multipole expansion through magnetic torque due to the Lorentz force. The implications of this fundamental discovery for intense magnetic interactions in natural materials and the conversion of solar energy to electricity with negligible heat generation will be discussed.

Continue reading… A New Twist on Electromagnetism for Energy Conversion – Stephen Rand

Continue reading… The 2015 Science Nobel Prizes – What were they given for? – Kurt Runge (Chemistry), Jim Kazura (Physiology or Medecine), Andrew Tolley (Physics)