Research Projects

Energy harvesting devices, imaging devices, and light sensors are crucial in various sectors like manufacturing, communications, and aviation. Understanding the materials that work reliably in most regimes of the electromagnetic spectrum is essential for their effective development. Quantum mechanics is being used to identify materials with unique properties, such as topological insulators, Weyl semimetals, and transition metal dichalcogenides. These materials exhibit properties such as topologically protected states, high mobility, and spin-momentum locking, opening up opportunities for low-power consumption devices. Topological quantum materials (TQM) exhibit strong nonlinear responses to the field, which is essential for applications in sensing and imaging technology. Devices can be tuned by changing the number of free electrons in a material, but there are fundamental obstacles to these applications. Thermal atomic vibrations, or phonons, affect the operation of these devices at room temperature. Existing models are idealized and describe clean systems at low temperatures. This project proposes developing a quantum kinetic approach to understand the non-equilibrium dynamics of TQMs. The theoretical framework will handle an arbitrary density of free electrons, apply to random temperatures, and capture the effects of disorder, phonons, and interactions among electrons. Combining this with density functional theory, a database will be produced by calculating the nonlinear response, helping researchers determine the best strategies for depicting TQMs with large current and applying operation to arbitrary temperatures.