General info
CONTACT: Dott. Andrea Rubano (andrea.rubano@unina.it)
RESPONSIBLE: Dr. Domenco Paparo (CNR-ISASI)
WEBSITE: click here
LOCATION: Università Federico II di Napoli
CONDITION: operative
Scope of the lab
We investigate various aspects of light-matter interaction by using ultrafast intense laser pulses, with particular emphasis on the case of hetero-structures and other spatially structured systems. Processes that are nonlinear in the optical field add new potentialities to standard optical spectroscopy, which has always been an invaluable experimental tool for elucidating fundamental mechanisms in condensed matter physics. For instance, by exploiting second-order processes (second harmonic generation – SHG, difference frequency generation – DFG, etc.) we investigate surface and interface properties with vertical sub-nanometer resolution or coherently generate single-cycle THz pulses, thus expanding our spectroscopic capability to the very-far infrared region. All these techniques may be implemented in a pump-probe scheme, allowing the investigation of the ultrafast dynamics of elementary excitations in materials. We have applied our spectroscopic tools to a large variety of materials with a special focus in recent years on the hetero-structures of transition-metal oxides, which exhibit unusual electronic properties due to strong electron-electron correlations. We are also interested in developing spatially structured ultrafast pulses and studying their interaction with matter.
Equipment
- Ultrafast femtosecond laser, Coherent Legend, 1 kHz, 800 nm, 35 fs, 4 mJ
- Optical Parametric Amplifier (Topas)
- THz spectrometer (bandwidth: 30 THz, peak E-field 0.7 kV/cm)
- SHG spectrometer (400-1600nm)
- Microscope cryocooler (80-600K)
- Linear spectrometer and optical characterization techniques
