Adaptive quantum design for nanoscience 

Stephan Haas

University of Southern California

Recent advances in nano-technology have enabled us to construct ultra-small opto-electronic devices, such as filters, modulators, and resonators. Material response functions can be made to order on the atomic level by explicitely breaking symmetries, such as relative widths in quasi-one-dimensional multi-layer dielectric filter arrays. This requires new software tools that optimize desired material response characteristics by finding the global minimum in large parameter landscapes of possible solutions.

In this seminar I will show a few examples of this adaptive quantum design, including optical filters in one and two dimensions and a quantum mechanical tight-binding model. Numerical optimization techniques, such as simulated annealing and the genetic algorithm, will be discussed briefly. This new approach will be useful in the design of a new generation of nano-devices.