Adaptive Quantum Design for Nanoscience

Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - 3:15pm - 4:30pm
Reiss 502
Prof. Stephan Haas
University of Southern California

Recent advances in nano-technology have enabled us to construct ultra-small opto-electronic devices, such as filters, modulators, and resonators. Material response functions can be made to order on the atomic level by explicitly breaking symmetries, such as relative widths in quasi-one-dimensional multi-layer dielectric filter arrays. This requires new software tools which optimize desired material response characteristics by finding the global minima in large parameter landscapes of possible solutions. In this seminar I will show a few examples of this adaptive quantum design, including optical filters in one and two dimensions and a quantum mechanical tight-binding model. Numerical optimization techniques, such as simulated annealing and the genetic algorithm, will be discussed briefly.

Host: Marcos Rigol
Discussion Leader: Marcos Rigol