Cavity electrodynamics of integrated quantum materials

Datum: 28.01.2026
Uhrzeit: 15:30 - 17:00
Vortragende(r): Hope Bretscher from MPSD Hamburg
Ort: MPI CPfS
Raum: Seminar rooms 1-2
Gastgeber: Dr. Uri Vool

Quantum materials embedded into devices have been observed to host a wide variety of quantum phases that can exhibit intriguing properties, like dissipationless transport, magnetism, or fractionalized carriers. Understanding the conditions under which these phenomena emerge is of great fundamental interest and important for deterministically designing materials for new applications.

In these device-integrated quantum materials, the macroscopic responses are not solely due to the intrinsic interactions of the materials. Instead, these interactions, and the resulting ground state physics, are modified by the specifics of the device integration. In this talk, I will discuss how integrated quantum materials form sub-wavelength cavities due to their micron-size, confining low-energy light into the near field. I will introduce time-domain on-chip THz spectroscopy as a technique to capture the cavity electrodynamics, probing the response of integrated materials to light on their natural frequency (~THz/meV) scales. Using on-chip THz spectroscopy, I observed ultrastrong light-matter hybridization in a graphene gate-tunable van der Waals heterostructure, and probed the quantum geometric contributions to effective mass in bilayer graphene aligned to hBN. These studies lay the groundwork for studying a wide range of low-energy quantum phases and wielding light-matter coupling as a new control parameter for engineering thermodynamic ground states.

The talk will also be available online on the CPfS seminar link:

https://mpi-cpfs.webex.com/mpi-cpfs/j.php?MTID=me963ad91427b567e655a436004d95a8d