Development of a high performance manycore-enabled finite element type solver for the numerical modeling of nanoscale light/matter interaction Master internship project Host institutions and supervisors

Nanostructuring of materials has opened up a number of new possibilities for manipulating and enhancing light-matter interactions, thereby improving fundamental device properties. Low-dimensional semiconductors, like quantum dots, enable one to catch the electrons and control the electronic properties of a material, while photonic crystal structures allow synthesizing the electromagnetic properties. These technologies may, e.g., be employed to make smaller and better lasers, sources that generate only one photon at a time for applications in quantum information technology, or miniature sensors with high sensitivity. The incorporation of metallic structures into the medium adds further possibilities for manipulating the propagation of electromagnetic waves. In particular, this allows subwavelength localization of the electromagnetic field and, by subwavelength structuring of the material, novel effects like negative refraction, e.g. enabling super lenses, may be realized. Nanophotonics is the field of science and technology aimed at establishing and using the peculiar properties of light and light-matter interaction in various nanostructures. Nanophotonics includes all the phenomena that are used in optical sciences for the development of optical devices. Because of its numerous scientific and technological applications (e.g. in relation to telecommunication, energy production and biomedicine), nanophotonics represents an active field of research increasingly relying on numerical modeling beside experimental studies. Computational nanophotonics is the discipline aiming at studying nanoscale light/matter interaction using computer simulations.