An exciting research area in condensed matter and materials physics is the response of matter to ultrafast stimuli, such that the eigenmode oscillation period is relatively long. In ferroic materials, the strongly coupled order parameters (magnetization, polarization, strain) and their highly nonlinear responses to fields (magnetic, electric, mechanical, and thermal) provide additional design flexibility for discovering new fundamental phenomena and new device applications. In this talk, I will first introduce a dynamical phase-field model that couples dynamics (spin, lattice, polarization, photon, plasmon) in multi-phase ferroic systems. I will then discuss the application of this computational tool to extract new mechanistic insights from known physical phenomena and discover new physical phenomena via the computational design of ferroic heterostructures and devices. Examples include (1) discovering new pathways to the excitation of coherent terahertz magnons by photoinduced ultrafast acoustic pulses in substrate-supported and freestanding magnetic multilayers; (2) predicting the dynamics of strongly coupled magnons and phonons in magnetic insulator films; (3) demonstrating a dynamical control of the energy flow and relative phase between two hybridized modes of magnons and cavity photons (Rabi-like oscillation and Ramsey-like interference) for quantum computing applications.
Dr. Jiamian Hu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison. Dr. Hu earned his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2013, completed his postdoctoral training and worked as a research associate at Penn State from 2013-2017, and joined the faculty of UW-Madison in 2018. He received his Graduate Student Gold Award (2011) and Postdoctoral Award (2015) from the Materials Research Society, and the Graduate student Excellence in Materials Science Diamond award from the American Ceramic Society. As a faculty member, Dr. Hu received the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator Award (2020), Vilas Associate Award (2021) for research from UW-Madison, the Innovation Award (2021) from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the Robert L. Coble Award for Young Scholars (2022) from the American Ceramic Society, and the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2023). Dr. Hu has published 89 peer-reviewed articles and is the main inventor of five US Patents. His current research focuses on mesoscale modeling of ferroic materials and devices, energy storage materials, and microstructure informatics.