News & Events
Terahertz Dynamics and Control in Complex Matter
Prof. Richard D. Averitt Boston University
Monday, November 26, 2012
3 p.m.4 p.m.
Sloan Auditorium
Abstract:
Ultrafast optical pulses have emerged as a powerful tool
to probe and control condensed matter. Importantly, femtosecond pulses
temporally resolve dynamics at the fundamental timescales of atomic and
electronic motion. Technological advances have resulted in the ability to
create these “optical” pulses from the far-infrared through hard x-ray regions
of the electromagnetic spectrum. This provides selective access to charge,
lattice, spin, and orbital dynamics. These pulses can also be used to drive
nonequilibrium phenomena in complex materials. One goal of these so-called “photoinduced
phase transitions” is to initiate cooperative quantum dynamics. Imagine, for
example, using photons to transiently create a superconductor or turn a charge
ordered insulator into a metastable ferromagnetic metal. Following an
introduction and overview of this research field, I will show examples of our
work using picosecond terahertz pulses to probe and control matter including
our recent demonstration of a metamaterial enhanced electric field driven
insulator-to-metal transition in vanadium dioxide.
Bio:
Richard Averitt received his PhD degree in Applied
Physics from Rice University for work on the synthesis and optical
characterization of gold nanoshells. Following this, Richard was a Los Alamos
National Laboratory Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow where his work focused on
time resolved far-infrared spectroscopy of strongly correlated electron
materials. In 2001, Richard became a member of the technical staff at Los
Alamos, and in 2005 a member of the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies
co-located at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories. In 2007, Richard
joined Boston University as a faculty member in the Department of Physics and
the Boston University Photonics Center. Richard’s research is primarily directed
towards characterizing, creating, and controlling the optical and electronic
properties of complex materials. This includes metamaterial and plasmonic
composites and quantum matter such as correlated transition metal oxides.