Alessandra Lanzara Featured in PREM Physics Seminar
Instead of repeating the same things over and over again we were able to flip Groundhog Day 2024 around by graciously hosting Prof. Alessandra Lanzara. She holds the Charles Kittel Chair in Physics at UC Berkeley, is a senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and is an expert in just about all aspects of condensed matter physics and material science.
And, yes, that's the Kittel from the famous thermal physics and solid-state textbooks that are probably on your shelves. She gave a super cool talk about ARPES techniques can probe topological excitonic states and their fingerprints on electronic structure.
Abstract
Excitons, bound states of electrons and holes, are fundamental quasiparticles induced by coherent light–matter interactions. Time and angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy has been
recently shown to be a powerful tool to reveal exciton formation in the single particle spectral function, opening up the exciting frontier to study momentum dependent exciton driven band structure renormalization, and ultimately search distinctive signature of exciton condensation in the band structure. Here I will discuss our recent work utilizing XUV and UV time resolved ARPES to study exciton formation in real time. I will show how their formation can uniquely modify the band structure in a k- dependent way and will reveal under which conditions these excitonic state can be driven in the presence of topological invariants, what properties of the topological state persists and what are their fingerprints in the material's band structure. I will also discuss the potential of these materials to drive excitonic condensation.
Bio Sketch
Alessandra Lanzara is the Charles Kittel Professor of Physics and a Senior Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is also the Chair of the Far West section of the American Physical Society. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. from the Universita' di Roma La Sapienza, and did postdoctoral research at Stanford University. Her research is focused on understanding electron behavior and fundamental interactions in quantum materials and on their manipulation with coherently sculpted field of light.
