InsPiRIng coMplex Architectures for LIGHT

InsPiRIng coMplex Architectures for LIGHT - PRIMA LIGHT
www.primalight.org (to appear)
old website at www.solarpaintproject.org
PI: Andrea Fratalocchi, Assistant professor of Electric Engineering - Applied Mathematics and Computational Science
PRIMA LIGHT is devoted to study the equation waves + disorder = complexity, enlightening the rules of randomness and
developing new breakthrough applications in the fields of energy, medicine and material science.
Some of our on-going research involving parallel computing
Structural glasses - pushing molecular dynamics
beyond the limits
X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFEL) - high energy physics at the Angstrom scale
X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFEL) are revolutionary photons sources,
whose ultrashort, brilliant pulses are expected to allow single molecule
diffraction experiments providing structural information on the atomic length
scale of non-periodic object. This ultimate goal, however, is currently
hampered by several challenging questions basically concerning sample
damage, Coulomb explosion and the role of nonlinearity. By employing an
original ab-initio approach, we address these issues showing that XFELbased single molecule imaging will be only possible with few-hundred long
attosecond pulses, due to significant radiation damage and the formation of
preferred multi-soliton clusters which reshape the overall electronic density
of the molecular system at the femtosecond scale.
Code: GZilla – Time Dependent Density Functional Theory +
Molecuar Dynamics + Finite Difference Time Domain
0 fs
0.4 fs
Code: BBMD – Billions-Body Molecular Dynamics
1.4 fs
2.1 fs
Far-field scattered angular pattern (red to yellow colormap), nuclei
position and electron density (blu to yellow colormap) time evolution of
an HNCO molecule irradiated by a short XFEL pulse with peak power
P=500 GW
A. Fratalocchi and G. Ruocco,”Molecular Imaging with XFEL: dream or reality?” Article in Review (preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.0140)
Complexity-driven photonics - a new paradigm at visible and terahertz wavelengths
We are studying a totally new generation of photonic
instruments made by complexity (i.e., quantum chaos, spinglass physics, Anderson localization and in general many-body
dynamics). In a first work, by combining ideas from wave chaos
and the physics of spin-glasses, we are developing ultrasensitive, ultra-efficient detectors of polarized Terahertz
radiation. These devices will then be employed the
astrophysical experiment BOOMERANG to provide answer to
fundamental questions concerning the origin of the Universe.
Code: NANO – Nonlinear Finite Difference Time Domain
Astrophysical applications in collaboration with Prof.
Paolo De Bernardis (Dan David prize 2009).
Thanks to our Billions-Body Molecular Dynamics (BBMD) code, we
will study for the first time the behavior of large-size structured
glasses characterized by tens of Billions of particles. This will permit
to answer long standing questions in the field of complex systems
concerning the existence and the dynamics of specific wave
vibrations (i.e., phonon states) of soft materials.
A 2D slice showing the refractive index
distribution of the sample
Light localization absent for TE
polarizations due to anisotropic
wave chaos
Energy of TM modes
An initial liquid mixture of two different species is rapidly heated to a
high temperature and then slowly cooled down. As the temperature
decreases, the energy E (image below on the left) diminishes its
value until a phase transition is attained near the temperature Tg=0.2.
The transition is observed as a discontinuous variation of the first
order derivative of E. For T<Tg, a glass phase is observed (image
below on the right).
Initial results for a “small” system of 1000000 particles
Energy of TE modes
Caloric curve Energy vs Temperature
Portion of the glass formed by the binary
mixture
A. Fratalocchi and G. Ruocco, Article in preparation.