Please post and forward to you groups, thanks! ______ excitonics seminar series [http://www.rle.mit.edu/excitonics/images/MarcoPolini.jpg] Marco Polini NEST, Istituto Nanoscienze-CNR and Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa Plasmonic Figures of Merit in a Doped Graphene Sheet Thursday, May 15, 2014 RLE Conference Room - 36-428 2:00 - 3:00 pm* *note time change Abstract: "Dirac" plasmons are self-sustained density oscillations that occur in a doped graphene sheet. These collective modes have recently attracted enormous experimental interest for their potential use in plasmonic circuits. In this talk I will discuss the two most important figures of merit of `graphene plasmonics', namely the ratio between the Dirac plasmon wavelength and the illumination wavelength, and the Dirac plasmon damping rate. More precisely, I will first discuss the fundamental properties of the Dirac plasmon dispersion, highlighting the main differences with respect to plasmons in ordinary two-dimensional parabolic-band electron liquids. I will then emphasize the subtle difference between plasmon lifetime and Drude transport scattering time. Finally, I will present a theoretical framework that allows to calculate in a fully microscopic fashion Dirac plasmon damping rates due to electron-electron, electron-impurity, and electron-phonon collisions. Bio Marco Polini received a Laurea degree in Physics from the University of Pisa in 1999 and a Ph.D. in Physics from Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (Italy) in 2003. In 2003, he was a Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Texas at Austin with Prof. Allan H. MacDonald's research group. He was a Visiting Professor at the Zhejiang Normal University, China, with Prof. Xianlong Gao and his team in 2007-2008 and at the Texas A&M University (College Station, Texas) in Prof. Jairo Sinova's group in 2012. In 2010, Marco received a prize for "the best foreign researcher who has the largest number of collaborations with Iranian counterparts" from the Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council (INIC). In that same year he was awarded the prestigious Italian grant "FIRB - Futuro in Ricerca.<http://www.plasmograph.it/> " Currently he is a Researcher and Assistant Professor at NEST, NEST, Istituto Nanoscienze-CNR<http://www.nano.cnr.it> and Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa<http://www.sns.it/en/> since 2008. His field of research is in condensed matter theory with more than 100 publications in peer-reviewed international journals including Science, Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Photonics, Nature Communications, and Physical Review Letters. Light refreshments will be served