- Department / Institute
- Physics Department / Chair of Hybrid Nanosystems
- Subject area
- Experimental Physics / Nanophotonics
- Name of supervisor
- Prof. Dr. Leonardo de Souza Menezes
- Number of open positions
- 1
- Project title
- Optical thermometry on nanoscale
- Language requirements
- Fluency in English
- Academic requirements
- 4-year Bachelor's plus Master's degree; good knowledge in materials characterization, linear and nonlinear optical spectroscopy, and in theoretical/computational modelling of dynamical systems.
- Study model
- Full doctoral study model: 48 months
- Contact
- L.Menezes@physik.uni-muenchen.de
Project description
Thermal effects manifest themselves in condensed matter systems in a variety of ways, from the simple deposition of energy in a material due to light absorption, leading to local heating and temperature increase, to the opposite effect, where phonon-assisted light absorption leads to material’s cooling. The first kind of process can be exploited for detecting nanoparticles with sub 10 nm sizes in diffraction limited optical systems, while the second is used for laser cooling of solids. There are in between a myriad of thermal processes and different ways to exploit and apply them. Rare-earth ions in solid state matrices are often used for obtaining frequency down- and upconversion of incident radiation allowing, among other things, to operate sensors for many physical quantities. In this project, we focus on investigating how thermal effects in rare-earth doped materials can be used for making thermometers in micro and nanoscopic scales down to the single nanoparticle level and the basic physical mechanisms governing the behavior of these nanothermometers, as well as for getting information about the materials in which these rare-earth ions are embedded and for getting thermal information in biological systems.