“Ultrafast carrier and spin dynamics in two-dimensional semiconductors"

Giulio Cerullo is a Full Professor with the Physics Department, Politecnico di Milano, where he leads the Ultrafast Optical Spectroscopy laboratory. Prof. Cerullo’s research activity covers a broad area known as “Ultrafast Optical Science”, and concerns, on the one hand, pushing our capabilities to generate and manipulate ultrashort light pulses, and on the other hand using such pulses to capture the dynamics of ultrafast events in bio-molecules, nanostructures and two-dimensional materials (graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides). He has published more than 450 papers that have received more than 20000 citations (H-index: 74). He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and of the European Physical Society and Chair of the Quantum Electronics and Optics Division of the European Physical Society. He is the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant (2012-2017) on two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy of biomolecules. He is on the Editorial Advisory Board of the journals Optica, Laser&Photonics Reviews, Scientific Reports, Chemical Physics, Journal of Raman spectroscopy. He is the General Chair of the conferences CLEO/Europe 2017, Ultrafast Phenomena 2018, and the International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy 2020. 

Abstract :
Layered materials are solids consisting of crystalline sheets with strong in-plane covalent bonds and weak van der Waals out-of-plane interactions. These materials can be easily exfoliated to a single layer (1L), obtaining two-dimensional (2D) materials with radically novel physico-chemical characteristics compared to their bulk counterparts. The field of 2D materials began with graphene and quickly expanded to include semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). 2D materials exhibit very strong light-matter interaction and exceptionally intense nonlinear optical response, enabling a variety of novel applications in optoelectronics and photonics. This talk will review our studies on the non-equilibrium and nonlinear optical response of 2D materials. We will discuss ultrafast carrier and spin dynamics in 2D semiconductors and their heterostructures. We will also show gate-tunable absorption saturation and third-harmonic generation in 1L-graphene and optical parametric amplification in 1L-TMDs.



Location: Zoom webinar: https://epfl.zoom.us/j/99858692475