- Department / Institute
- Physics Department / Chair of Hybrid Nanosystems
- Subject area
- Experimental Physics / Nanophotonics
- Name of supervisor
- Prof. Dr. Leonardo de Souza Menezes
- Number of open positions
- 1
- Project title
- Efficient generation of coherent surface acoustic waves using single plasmonic nanoparticles and their manipulation
- Language requirements
- Fluency in English
- Academic requirements
- 4-year Bachelor's plus Master's degree; good knowledge in advanced electromagnetic theory and strong knowledge in optical characterization techniques. Skills in computational simulations (FDTD or COMSOL) are highly desirable.
- Study model
- Full doctoral study model: 48 months
- Contact
- L.Menezes@physik.uni-muenchen.de
Project description
Miniaturization and speed of electronic and optical components represent an essential step towards the achievement of high performance, low environmental impact, and lightweight devices. Recently, new approaches to this subject aiming at more compact and fast devices, exploiting the lattice strain created in a solid described by its fundamental excitations are gaining attention in the fast-growing field of phononics. Phonons are particularly interesting due to the possibility of interacting with virtually any excitations observable in the solid-state phase. Acoustic phonons present inspiring analogies with photons. For example, both sound in a solid and light in a transparent medium present linear dispersion relation and are weakly attenuated. There is, nevertheless, an important difference in the behavior of these elementary excitations: the propagation velocity for phonons in a transparent solid is in the range of a few km/s, which is ~105 smaller than the speed of light in the same medium. Phononics-based devices take direct advantage of this: in the RF domain (hundreds of MHz to tens of GHz), extremely relevant for the realization of microwave devices and for telecommunications. Photon-based devices are bulky since the wavelength of light lies in the range of meters to centimeters. Meanwhile, phononics-based devices operating in the same frequency range can be reduced by a factor of 105, in the range between 10 microns to 100 nanometers, fitting into small, micrometer-sized chips. The goal of the project is to produce basic scientific knowledge and develop technologies for generating high amplitude, long range phononic waves and manipulating them for realizing ultrafast (responses ~ tens of GHz) and nanoscale (typical sizes ~ 100 nm) phononics-based modulators of mechanical and optical properties of materials presenting quantum confinement effects.