Francesco BUONEMANI

The goal of the PhD project is to study topological materials coupled to cavity photons, with the aim of using cavity embedding to probe, control, and design new topological phases. The project focuses on electronic tight-binding models in the presence of coupling to photons and electron–electron interactions.

One objective of the project is to propose a new approach for observing topological bound states based on cavity spectroscopy. Excluding signatures of zero-energy states that are of non-topological origin is one of the main questions to address. Another objective is to consider a topological material coupled to a single-mode cavity in the resonant regime (when the cavity frequency equals the gap in the electronic material) and to study the properties of hybrid light-matter states - polaritons - emerging in this regime. Specific questions include the topological nature of these polaritons and how they could be used for quantum computing applications, for instance, to encode a qubit.

The most ambitious objective is to design topological states in electronic materials with trivial band topology using quantum light. Two possible avenues to explore include the use of circularly polarized quantum light and a multi-mode spatially inhomogeneous cavity to engineer tailored forms of electron–electron interactions.