Abstract:

In this talk, I will describe how a systematic inclusion of Hartree-Fock field and energy renormalization terms together with higher order correlations, account for most microscopic processes involved on light semiconductor interactions. The theory will be shown to provide a one-to-one agreement with gain measurements across many classes of semiconductor quantum well materials and establishes the limitations of the famous ABC laws that phenomenologically account respectively for defect, spontaneous emission radiative and Auger losses. My talk will include examples of experiments on a broad class semiconductor disk lasers where the microscopic theory was used to design a host of novel CW and mode locked laser sources with applications to compact extreme UV, room temperature tunable THz, artificial Guidestar, offset=free mid-IR frequency comb and angle tunable multi-wavelength sources. Recently, the theory was extended to a novel class of quasi-2D Transition Metal Dichalcogenide (TMDC) materials that exhibit huge hundreds of meV bandgap renormalization and have prominent room temperature excitonic features. A monolayer of this material exhibits a finite bandgap in the visible and an indirect gap for dual or multilayers. In contrast to graphene which exhibits a zero energy band gap, these materials have been shown to lase in the visible. These novel materials are proposed as wearable sensors, in spintronics, solar cells, as photodetectors etc.

Biography:

Jerome V. Moloney is Professor of Mathematics and Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona and Director of the Arizona Center for Mathematical Sciences. He received his B.Sc. in chemistry from University College Cork and his Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Western Ontario.

His research spans nonlinear optics, computational photonics, semiconductor and fiber lasers, ultrashort high-power pulse propagation, nanophotonics, and semiconductor many-body physics. A central theme of his work is connecting microscopic physical models and large-scale computation with the predictive design of practical optical devices, including semiconductor disk lasers and ultrafast laser systems.

Professor Moloney received the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in Physics, which supported an extended research stay at Philipps University Marburg. He is also a Fellow of Optica, recognized for his development of mathematical methods for investigating complex spatiotemporal phenomena in nonlinear optics and lasers. He has authored more than 400 peer-reviewed publications and delivered more than 200 invited presentations.