PhD Position in Ultrafast Physics

at  Universit du Luxembourg

The University of Luxembourg is an international research university with a distinctly multilingual and interdisciplinary character. The University was founded in 2003 and counts more than 6,700 students and more than 2,000 employees from around the world. The University’s faculties and interdisciplinary centres focus on research in the areas of Computer Science and ICT Security, Materials Science, European and International Law, Finance and Financial Innovation, Education, Contemporary and Digital History. In addition, the University focuses on cross-disciplinary research in the areas of Data Modelling and Simulation as well as Health and System Biomedicine. Times Higher Education ranks the University of Luxembourg #3 worldwide for its “international outlook,” #20 in the Young University Ranking 2021 and among the top 250 universities worldwide.
The Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine (FSTM) contributes multidisciplinary expertise in the fields of Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, Computer Science, Life Sciences and Medicine. Through its dual mission of teaching and research, the FSTM seeks to generate and disseminate knowledge and train new generations of responsible citizens, in order to better understand, explain and advance society and environment we live in.

We are seeking highly motivated candidates to be employed either at Postdoctoral or Doctoral level (PhD) to set up a new research line at the University of Luxembourg (UL). In particular we will target the development of advanced ultrafast tools and techniques with the goal to exploit them for the investigation of fundamental light-matter interaction processes occurring on the femtosecond timescale.
The goal of the experimental activity will be to investigate electron-electron and electron-phonon dynamics in layered and 2D materials, in metallic/semiconducting nanostructures and in strongly correlated systems. We will also exploit the electric field of single cycle pulses to drive ultrafast currents in nanocircuits with the appealing perspective of studying electronic transport in quantized systems with unprecedented temporal resolution. The research activity will be based on the development of novel ultrafast laser sources that work at high repetition rates while keeping the possibility to generate pulses approaching the single-cycle duration combined with broad tunability from UV to the THz frequency range. By pushing the experimental sensitivity to its limits it will be possible to study fundamental processes in physical systems where dimensionality plays a key role.

The projects available are:

• Ultrafast plasmonics in single metallic and semiconducticting nanostructured studied with sub-optical-cycle precision
• Investigation of dynamical phenomena in condensed matter (correlated systems, 2D materials, …) via advanced ultrafast techniques (pump-probe, THz, 2D spectroscopy)
• Development of novel ultrafast laser sources and of frequency coversion based on nonlinear optics concepts