Time: Friday, December 13th, 2019 12:00-13:00
Location: Room 4304 at Department of Precision Instrument

Abstract
Vanadium dioxide (VO2) has attracted rapidly increasingly attention during the last decade as an ultrafast “smart switch” in nanoscale optical, opto-electronic and electronic devices.  The basis for this interest has been a series of experiments that plumbed the mechanisms at work in the insulator-to-metal transition(IMT) of VO2, and have now shown that in thin films, the limiting speed of the IMT is of order 25 fs. In this context, I will describe efforts underway at Vanderbilt to deploy VO2 as a modulator component suitable for devices that are designed for broadband optical limiting, phonon polaritonics and silicon photonics.

Biography
Richard Haglund was educated at Wesleyan University, graduating with a B. A. magna cum laude with Honors in Physics.  He received an M. A. in physics from Stony Brook University just before being drafted into the United States Army; he was discharged from active service as a 1st Lieutenant in the Signal Corps in 1971.  Haglund received the Ph.D. in experimental nuclear physics from the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill).  He was a member of the scientific staff of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1976 to 1984, beginning as a postdoctoral staff member in nuclear physics and then joining the laser fusion program a year later.  He joined the faculty of Vanderbilt in 1984 and currently is Stevenson Professor of Physics.  Haglund is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Senior Scientist Prize for contributions to materials physics.