Research

Our group asks a simple question: where does energy go after a material embedded in a photonic environment absorbs light? 

Answering it from first principles means following excited electrons as they scatter off one another, dump energy into the lattice, and eventually return the material to equilibrium — a cascade that unfolds across femtoseconds to nanoseconds and sets the efficiency of nearly every optoelectronic and energy-conversion technology. 

We develop and apply ab initio methods that treat these couplings without adjustable parameters, combining density functional perturbation theory, Wannier interpolation, and real-time quantum dynamics to predict carrier lifetimes, hot-phonon bottlenecks, coherent lattice motion, and transport in real materials. Much of this work is carried out in open-source community codes, including Quantum ESPRESSO and Perturbo, to which we are active contributors.

A second thread of our research treats light itself as a quantum degree of freedom rather than a prescribed external field. Building on quantum-electrodynamical density functional theory (QEDFT) and macroscopic QED, we study how confining photons in cavities, waveguides, and photonic-crystal structures modifies the electronic and vibrational properties of solids — from cavity-renormalized electron–phonon coupling to the possibility of enhancing superconductivity by engineering the electromagnetic vacuum. 

The unifying idea is that a photonic environment does more than concentrate an optical field: it can selectively redirect energy among electronic excitations, coherent and incoherent phonons, and emitted photons, offering a knob on dissipation and transient functionality that no external laser pulse alone provides.

Bringing these threads together, we are building a predictive multiscale framework that links first-principles material response to Maxwell solvers for realistic integrated photonic devices, and ultimately to inverse design — optimizing geometry, excitation, and material placement for a target physical outcome. 

We test the theory against experimentally accessible systems such as wurtzite GaN, silicon, and layered charge-density-wave compounds, and we release our methods as open software so others can build on them. 

Students and postdocs in the group learn the full stack: the many-body theory underneath, the numerical methods that make it tractable, and the high-performance computing practice needed to run it at scale. We welcome inquiries from anyone curious about how light, electrons, and lattices talk to each other.