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Optoelectronic devices harnessing solar energy can be improved by incorporating colloidal soft materials as energy harvesters, waveguides, optical filters, and photo- and thermocatalysts. Understanding and controlling the light-matter interactions of these components is crucial to improving their performance. The Z lab focuses on using controlled assembly of colloidal nanoparticles to tune their optical and thermal properties
Inverse Design
Inverse Design
Suppose we want to make a soft material with a particular optical behavior, for example, large absorption at some wavelength of light or high optical transmission across a range of wavelengths. How do we make such a material? What building blocks do we start with and how should we arrange them? We could make a guess, build the material, test its optical properties, check whether those match our desired optical properties, and repeat this many many timesthrough trial and error until we find a material that suits our purposes.
Does that sounds wasteful and time-consuming? It is! Instead, we are currently developing tools to automate this process and make discovery of new optical metamaterials more efficient. A user inputs target optical behavior and then numerical optimization routines efficiently discover self-assembled materials with the desired properties.
The red star indicates the (currently unknown) parameters of a material with a desired optical extinction spectrum (red curve). Rather than search the entire parameter space to find the optimum, only the small number of points on the optimization path are sampled.
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