Dr. Ekaterina Khestanova

Postdoctoral Fellow

ICFO - Institute of Photonic Sciences

My latest activity as a Marie-Skłodowska Curie fellow at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) is focused on the studies of THz near-field response of superconducting materials. This includes both application-oriented and fundamental research. For the applications I employ spatially resolved imaging of the photoconductive hotspots in superconducting single-photon detectors and bolometers. While for the fundamental studies I am mainly interested in the collective modes to unveil the phenomenology of unconventional superconductors such as high-Tc compounds and magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene.

Previously at the ITMO University I have studied the exciton-polaritons in monolayers of transitional metal dichalcogenides coupled to photonic crystal cavities. Fine-tuning of the photonic crystal nanofabrication process allowed me to engineer the high-quality factor optical states (bound states in the continuum) in resonance with the excitons in monolayer MoSe2 and observe extremely narrow polaritonic lines. This has led to a number of highly cited publications on the topic.

In parallel with the experimental work at ITMO I have developed a setup for precision transfer of large-area atomically thin layers (Patent RU2742761C1). The setup has enabled a new large-scale transfer technique.

During my Ph.D. at the University of Manchester I have worked on the design of the first 2D materials transfer system in a glovebox. This setup allowed me to stabilize and measure superconducting transition in a monolayer NbSe2 for the first time. Another part of my Ph.D. was dedicated to the studies of inhomogeneities (nanobubbles) appearing in van der Waals heterostructures.