Quantum geometry of electronic states and their macroscopic manifestations

Seminars | Friday, July 18, 2025 | 11:00:00
Speaker:
Thaís Trevisan

Following the discovery of the quantum Hall effect, it became evident that a complete understanding of the physical properties of solids requires going beyond the standard band theory by considering the information encoded in the geometry of the Bloch wave functions, a concept called quantum geometry. Geometric quantities such as the Berry curvature are directly related to the origin of the linear anomalous Hall effect and to topological invariants in 2D electronic systems. Another geometric quantity is the quantum metric, which is related to the distance between quantum states. Although less explored, recent works revealed that the quantum metric plays a very important role in observables, especially in nonlinear optical and transport phenomena. In this talk, we theoretically show how quantum geometry manifests in multidimensional optical spectroscopy, which uses sequences of multiple light pulses to probe a material. The multidimensional spectrum has been attracting increasing attention in recent years due to its potential of revealing microscopic information that is hidden in linear and single-pulse nonlinear responses. We show that the optical multidimensional spectrum can be generally expressed in terms of band geometric quantities beyond the Berry curvature, offering a new pathway to probe the quantum geometry of electronic states.