The past couple of decades has seen a revolution in materials technology, the emergence of atomically thin materials. This was initiated by the discovery of graphene (2010 Nobel prize), but the field now comprises a range of different materials in the ultimate single-atom-thin limit. This project will focus on a particular class, the so-called transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), that possess a range of properties that make them of great interest for applications in electronics and optoelectronics. First of all, the typical energy scales in these systems are well above room temperature, meaning that one can potentially observe non-trivial quantum effects without resorting to cryogenic environments. Furthermore, these materials interact very strongly with light, which enables a host of applications from quantum information processing to atomically thin LEDs.
Our group has a number of different projects in this area, related to the prospect of generating strong interactions between photons by strongly coupling light to matter, the possibility of generating superfluids of light-matter quasiparticles, and the interplay of light-matter coupling and electronic doping.
Supervisor: A/Prof. Meera Parish and Dr Jesper Levinsen
See https://www.monash.edu/science/schools/physics/honours/honours-project to apply.