IRES Track I: International Research Experience for Students in Computational Nanoscience

The vision of this proposal is to motivate students to become part of a new generation of computational scientists solving important technological problems in materials science, physics and

chemistry by computer simulations. The researchers from Vanderbilt University will train U.S. students in both theoretical and practical aspects of computer simulations, and enhance their professional development with research opportunities in computational projects in an international research environment. The IRES site will be established at the brand new unique Extreme Light Infrastructure ELI Attosecond Light Pulse Source (ELI-ALPS) facility in Szeged, Hungary.

It is expected that the ELI-ALPS will have a huge impact on numerous fields of materials sciences, medicine, and environment protection in the future. The ELI-ALPS is a truly international laboratory with researchers from dozens of countries from all over the world. The IRES students working with the Hungarian hosts will join theoretical-experimental collaborations working on various projects in ELI-ALPS.

The main objective of the proposal is to immerse U.S. undergraduate students in challenging and technologically important computational nanoscience projects in an international collaborative framework. The students will develop and use computer simulation tools to model the interaction of light and nanoscale matter. Strongly coupled hybrid light matter states will be explored with large scale variational calculations and a coupled Maxwell-quantum approach will be used to describe laser excitations in nanostructures.

The research projects include the study of light-controlled electron transport, terahertz electronics, electron ratchets, hybrid coupled and light-matter systems; with direct relevance to quantum plasmonics, information processing and quantum computations. A new approach, which was developed by the undergraduate students in the PI’s group, will be used to describe the interaction of light and matter in optical cavities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.