Missions

The postdoc will benefit from stimulating environments in Strasbourg (D. Hagenmüller, CESQ-ISIS) and Bordeaux (R. Avriller, LOMA) for carrying theoretical work, and will collaborate with a local experimental group (C. Genet/T. Ebbesen, ISIS) with strong expertise in chiral light-matter interactions and strongly-coupled molecular systems in cavities. The project is part of the national project "TORNADO" funded by the PEPR LUMA ("programme et équipements
prioritaires de recherche" on light-matter interaction) involving 13 different laboratories with outstanding expertise in chiral light-matter interactions.

Activities

The goal of the project is theoretically propose and investigate cavity-induced modifications of chiroptical and topological properties of materials embedded inside open Fabry-Perot chiral cavities or chiral plasmonic structures specifically designed to host chiral modes.

Skills

The project is focused on the development of theory models. Most of the work will thus be analytical calculations, but numerical skills will be greatly appreciated. The candidate must have a PhD in theoretical physics (date of PhD defense typically less than 2 years before hiring), and a strong background in quantum optics models, and/or condensed-matter theory (solid-state/molecular systems), and/or quantum transport. The postdoc will eventually collaborate with PhD students working on similar topics. A good command of English, an ability to work in a team, and strong communication skills for presenting scientific results are also desired.

Work Context

Over the past decades, a new paradigm to control the properties of materials has emerged. This paradigm relies on the introduction of a cavity or a photonic structure in close contact with the material. In such geometries, extreme regimes of light-matter interactions can be reached when the coupling strength is larger than the other relevant energy scales, which can lead to modifications of the basic material properties including charge [1,2] and energy [3,4] transport, chemical reactivity [5,6], and intermolecular interactions [7]. A full understanding and exploitation of those effects is still lacking, therefore there is a clear need for theory models and simulations to investigate and design new devices, in collaboration with experimentalists. In this context, an emerging field of research is the chiral strong coupling regime, which can be reached by embedding chiral materials in chiral cavity resonators [8,9]. The cavity vacuum field is a new degree of freedom that can be exploited not only to encode chirality but also to control, e.g., asymmetric chemistry in chiral molecular assemblies or topological properties in 2D materials [10], with potential applications in pharmacology and quantum information processing, respectively. In particular, the use of open-system approaches is needed to compute optical signatures that are useful to experimentalists such as transmittance, reflectance, or absorbance.

[1] E. Orgiu et al., Nature Materials 14, 1123 (2015)
[2] S. Kumar et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc. (2024)
[3] X. Zhong et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 56, 9034 (2017)
[4] A. Bard et al., Adv. Optical Mater. 10, 2200349 (2022)
[5] J.A. Hutchison et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 51, 1592 (2012)
[6] A. Thomas et al., Science 363, 615 (2019)
[7] B. Xiang et al., Science 368, 665 (2020)
[8] H. Hübener et al., Nature Materials 20, 438 (2021)
[9] C. Genet, ACS Photonics 9, 319 (2022)
[10] T. Chervy et al., ACS Photonics 5, 1281 (2018)

The position is located in a sector under the protection of scientific and technical potential (PPST), and therefore requires, in accordance with the regulations, that your arrival is authorized by the competent authority of the MESR.

Constraints and risks

No identified risk or particular constraint