Illuminating a material with light can reveal both interesting aspects of electronic and lattice degrees of freedom, as well as drive phase and topological transitions in the material itself. In this talk, I will focus on three distinct responses of a material to light: (1) Nonlinear phononic control of magnetism in bilayer CrI , MnBi Te , and MnSb Te. (2) The non-linear photogalvanic response of Weyl semimetals with tilted cones and chiral charge up to 4 (the largest allowed in a lattice model), as well as the topological superconductor candidate 4Hb-TaS , and (3) The coupling of phonons to electronic degrees of freedom to produce chiral phonons with large g factors of order 1, which can be measured with Raman scattering.  I will discuss how these nonlinear responses are related to the underlying quantum geometry of the Bloch states and present a perspective on interesting frontiers in out-of-equilibrium quantum materials.

Greg Fiete received his PhD in theoretical physics from Harvard University, and did postdoctoral work at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. He was a Lee A. DuBridge Prize Fellow in Theoretical Physics at Caltech. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award, a DARPA Director’s Fellowship, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics, and a Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. Currently, he serves as the head of center for quantum matter and correlated electron theory at Northeastern University and is an affiliated faculty at MIT.

All faculty, researchers and students are invited to attend.