Graduate Program in Physics at UFSC, Florianópolis

The talk will consist of two parts dedicated, respectively, to linear and non-linear optical properties of graphene in the terahertz (THz) spectral range, related to its unique electronic spectrum (gapless and linear in momentum).

In the first part, surface plasmon-polaritons (SPPs) in graphene will be discussed along with several possible ways of their coupling to propagating electromagnetic waves in the THz range, such as (i) the attenuated total reflection (ATR) method employing a prism, (ii) graphene-based gratings or graphene monolayers with modulated conductivity, (iii) a metallic stripe or a needle tip on top of the graphene layer. Potentially interesting for applications SPP effects, such as switching, modulation and polarization of THz radiation will be considered.

In the second part some effects of the optical non-linearity of the surrounding medium or of graphene itself will be considered, including mixed polariton solitons of TE type, optical bistability of a graphene layer, and lattice solitons in a multilayer stack of graphene sheets.

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Sem categoria

Seminar with prof. Francesca Gulminelli – 22/May/2015 – 10h15min

18/05/2015 10:21

THE PHYSICS GRADUATE PROGRAM invites everyone to the seminar:

: University of Caen-Basse Normandie (France)

Sub-saturation equation of state for Core-Collapse Supernovae and Neutron Stars

Francesca Gulminelli – LPC/Ensicaen and University of Caen (France)

Abstract:

The construction of a realistic equation of state for dense matter as it can be found in core-collapse supernovae and neutron stars is a formidable task which is not yet completely achieved. The structure of very high density matter in the neutron star core is by far the most uncertain part of the EoS modeling. However, even in the least exotic regime of sub-saturation matter, where the degrees of freedom are purely nucleonic and relatively well-known, the presence of clustering due to the Coulomb quenching of the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition requires beyond mean-field methods properly treating all the complexity of nuclear structure, in a regime of neutron-rich matter where no experimental data exist to validate the available effective interactions.

Self-consistent mean-field approaches with realistic effective interactions are still routinously applied at zero temperature. This is justified thanks to the Wigner-Seitz structure of stellar matter, which reduces the thermodynamic limit to a single nucleus problem. However, a consistent treatment at finite temperature in principle implies beyond mean-field configuration mixing. This is presently a problem since existing models are either done in the single nucleus approximation, or do not recover the single-nucleus Wigner-Seitz limit of zero temperature.

In this talk we will present a density-functional formalism which, by introducing explicit cluster degrees of freedom, consistently describes the neutron-rich nuclei immersed in the gas of their continuum states in the inner crust, and the nuclear statistical equilibrium of different in-medium modified nuclear species in supernova matter. The influence of the effective interaction, and specifically the density dependence of the symmetry energy, will also be discussed.