LOTUS project receives funding to push the limits of optical metrology
Anchit Srivastava, postdoctoral researcher at ARCNL, has been awarded an ERC Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral fellowship for advancing the frontiers of optical metrology. The goal of his LOTUS project is to understand insulator-to-metal transitions by resolving their switching mechanisms across both time and space. Such studies could unlock the potential of these special materials as a promising complement to silicon in the next generation of electronic devices.
Next-generation electronic materials
Transition-metal oxides are a unique class of materials whose electrical behavior can be switched on demand, making them powerful candidates for future electronics beyond silicon. Their ability to change from insulating to conducting states at ultrafast speeds opens the door to next-generation memory technologies like ReRAM, which promise faster, more energy-efficient data storage.
However, fully unlocking this potential requires understanding how these transitions unfold in both time and space. These processes occur in mere femtoseconds and across nanometer-scale regions, far too fast and small for conventional optical techniques to capture. Thus, a technique capable of resolving these changes simultaneously in both time and space is essential to truly understand these transitions. This is precisely the gap postdoctoral researcher Anchit Srivastava aims to bridge with his project, “Lightwave-driven spatio-temporal metrology of transition-metal oxides,” or LOTUS, for short.
Anchit has been awarded an ERC Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship for the LOTUS project, which could contribute to advancements in optical metrology and semiconductor manufacturing. “Currently, there aren’t any far-field super-resolution optical microscopy techniques to perform these kinds of measurements,” says Anchit. “Instead of using electron-based imaging techniques, which are usually damaging to the sample, I’m excited to further develop a new method, developed here at ARCNL, using light for ultrafast studies in solids.”
Ultra-fast, ultra small
In the LOTUS project, Anchit will work to push the resolution limits of the previously developed HADES technique in both space and time. HADES was developed in large part by Kevin Murzyn, a PhD candidate and fellow member of Peter Kraus’s research group at ARCNL. The technique, aptly named Harmonic Deactivation Microscopy, achieves spatial resolution higher than the diffraction limit by deactivating part of the illuminating laser beam. More information can be found in this previous news item about HADES.
Anchit’s work, however, will expand on this technique to further increase spatial resolution and add time resolution to it as well, with the goal of being able to measure processes at less than 10 femtoseconds. For comparison, this is more than 100 billion times the frame rate of a high-end TV screen. “Using the nonlinear optics in gas-filled hollow-core optical fibers, we can generate ultrashort laser pulses,” explains Anchit. “This, combined with HADES, can help us measure processes in solids with sub-100-nanometer precision in space and sub-10 femtoseconds in time.”
Anchit’s LOTUS project could further developments in materials science and condensed-matter physics, while also directly benefiting engineers and industry working on next-generation memory, neuromorphic computing, and ultrafast electronics.
Contact
For more information about this work, contact Anchit Srivastava.
