Diana Qiu
Yale University, CT·Physics·Early-career
When light hits a material, electrons respond in ways that depend strongly on how they interact with one another and with the atoms around them. These interactions are called many-body effects, and they are hard to calculate.
- Fields
Physics
Chemistry
Materials Science
- Topics
GW approximation
Bethe-Salpeter equation
many-body perturbation theory
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Feb 2029
What they work on
- Develop ab initio software built on the GW plus Bethe–Salpeter equation approach that calculates how electrons in chiral hybrid perovskites absorb left- versus right-circularly polarized light (circular dichroism).
- Model how excitons, spin–orbit coupling, and lattice distortions in the excited state interact to transfer molecular chirality into the optical response of layered hybrid perovskites.
- Build a real-time first-principles method using time-dependent adiabatic GW within the Keldysh formalism to simulate strongly nonlinear high harmonic generation in solids.
- Identify signatures of topology, spin, polarization textures, and excitons in high harmonic spectra of two-dimensional materials, and test the limits of the method's approximations.
More about the research
Predicting them accurately from first principles (ab initio, meaning without fitted parameters) is key to designing faster, smaller optical and electronic technologies. Both projects develop new theory and software to capture these effects. Both build on the GW method, an approach that describes how an electron is screened by all the other electrons around it.
Why it matters
Accurate theory for how light interacts with electrons could guide the design of smaller, faster, and more efficient spin-optoelectronic and chiral photonic devices, such as light-emitting diodes and quantum sensors. Better models of high harmonic generation could also support new extreme-ultraviolet attosecond light sources and all-optical probes of a material's electronic structure.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Wanyi Nie
University at Buffalo, NY·Materials Science
Grow and characterize heterostructures of chiral hybrid perovskites and 2D transition metal dichalcogenides to study interlayer excitons, electron–hole pairs spanning the interface.
Xu Zhang
California State University-Northridge, CA·Chemistry
Use density functional theory calculations and machine learning, alongside in-situ characterization, to explain how N-heterocyclic carbene ligands bind noble metal surfaces and thereby control nanocrystal size and exposed facets.
Aldo Romero
West Virginia University, WV·Materials Science
Extend the DMFTwDFT code into a unified open-source framework combining DFT, DFT+U and dynamical mean field theory on the VASP and SIESTA codes, supporting both collinear and noncollinear magnetic configurations.
The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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