PhD studentship on Reconfigurable graphene-based metamaterials
Length of Award: 4 years from September 2015
Value: Tuition fee, stipend of £13,863, and travel funding of £1,500 (UK and EU students) Tuition fee only (non-EU students).
Supervisors: Prof Saverio Russo and Dr. Monica Craciun
The University of Exeter is a top 10 UK university, and a member of the elite Russell Group of institutions. It was named University of the Year in The Sunday Times University Guide 2013 and is in 8th place in The Sunday Times league table for 2014. Recent capital projects to the value of GBP 350 million across the University ensure a truly world-class research and teaching environment and inspirational location to work and live.
The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Metamaterials (XM2) is hosted by the University of Exeter, and located entirely in the Engineering and Physics buildings on the Streatham Campus. We recruited 18 excellent students in our first year and are admitting another 14-18 PhD students in September 2015.
Project Overview
Texturing the surface of a material allows direct control over its interactions with electromagnetic waves. In this way it is possible to engineer the transparency of a system to specific wavelengths of light, and this concept is playing a pivotal role for the development of highly efficient solar cells and cloacking. The potential of the underlying physics of plasmons is yet to be fully realized, as it offers novel ways to manipulate the optical properties of emerging atomically thin materials, and this novel research area is the one where the research proposed sits in.
More specifically, the possibility to tune in-situ and switch the properties of metamaterials such as plasmonic arrays (textured systems with regular structures typically on a 100nm length scale) in the visible and near-infrared range is an open quest. In this project, the student will pioneer a new generation of reconfigurable plasmonic systems based on textured graphene with magnetic molecules. She/he will exploit the possibility to manipulate molecular orbitals in magnetic molecules attached to the surface of a graphene basal plane by means of an external magnetic field [Science 296, 1443 (2002)]. In this system, an external magnetic field will be used to tune the charge transfer to (from) graphene accomplishing an unprecedented reconfigurable response of graphene metamaterials.
We will exploit two main aspects to attain a reconfigurable plasmonic response in functionalized graphene arrays: (1) magnetic field dependent dielectric constant; (2) magnetic field dependent molecular orbitals and affinity.
Application Details:
Please, send your academic CV to Dr. Monica Craciun (m.f.craciun@exeter.ac.uk) before January 25th, 2015. Salary: £13,863.00 /year
