Prize Recipient

Edbert Sie received his Ph.D. in physics at MIT in 2017, supervised by Prof. Nuh Gedik. His dissertation made several key contributions to our understanding of light-matter interactions in atomically-thin transition-metal dichalcogenides. By applying ultrafast laser spectroscopy, he has developed a new, dissipationless optical method to control the exciton energy in a valley-selective manner through the optical Stark effect and the Bloch-Siegert shift. He also presented a number of key results on the many-body interactions between excitons in this system. This includes the observation of intervalley biexcitons, biexcitonic optical Stark effect, and the exciton-exciton interactions that mimic the Lennard-Jones interactions between atoms. His dissertation revealed an important connection between light-matter interactions in atoms and solids and should make ways for enhanced optical control in two-dimensional materials. He has received the Springer Nature Thesis Award (2017) for his dissertation work and the Stanford GLAM Fellowship (2017). After receiving his Ph.D., he has been working as a Postdoctoral GLAM Fellow at Stanford University in Prof. Aaron Lindenberg's group, where he uses ultrafast electron diffraction to take snapshots of the atomic-scale structures in motion.