Physics Colloquium

Vinod Menon, Ph.D., of City College and Graduate Center (CUNY), will present, “Control of Light Matter Interaction in 2D Materials.”

Two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals materials have emerged as a very attractive class of optoelectronic material due to the unprecedented strength in its interaction with light. In this talk, Menon will discuss approaches to enhance and control this interaction by integrating these 2D materials with microcavities, and metamaterials. He will first discuss the formation of strongly coupled half-light, half-matter quasiparticles (microcavity polaritons) and their spin-optic control in the 2D transition metal dichacogenide (TMD) systems. Following this, Menon will discuss the formation of polaritons using excited states (Rydberg states) to enhance the nonlinear polariton interaction. Recent results on electrical control and realization of a polariton LED based on 2D TMDs will also be presented. Finally, he will talk about strain-activated, room temperature, single-photon emission from hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) which can be integrated with microresonators on silicon photonic platform.