Seminari: ‘How can polarization spectroscopy be harnessed for materials characterization?’

The seminari ‘How can polarization spectroscopy be harnessed for materials characterization?’ a càrrec del professor visitant Dongmao Zhang, de la Universitat Estatal de Mississippi will take place at the Escola d’Enginyeria de Barcelona. This seminar offers a critical examination of commonly used nonpolarized, linearly polarized, and circularly polarized spectroscopic techniques, highlighting not only their strengths but also systematic limitations that routinely lead to ambiguous or misleading conclusions in materials characterization. Drawing on recent advances from our group, developed in collaboration with external partners, I will introduce measurement strategies and instrumental architectures that explicitly account for cascading photon matter interactions among absorption, scattering, and emission. These approaches improve measurement reliability, reproducibility, and interpretive clarity, enabling more faithful separation of intrinsic material responses from measurement induced distortions and, in some cases, deliberately leveraging coupled optical phenomena to extract otherwise inaccessible physical insight.