Ventsislav K. Valev, (born 31 August 1976 in Silistra, Bulgaria), is a Bulgarian physicist at the University of Bath, where he served as the Head of Department (2022-2025). He works in the fields of nonlinear nanophotonics and chirality, including the Hyper Rayleigh Scattering Optical Activity effect.
Valev holds a PhD degree from Radboud University, obtained under the supervision of Prof. Theo Rasing. Valev joined the University of Bath as a University Research Fellow of the Royal Society and Reader (Associate Professor) in 2014. He served as the Head of the University's Department of Physics from 2022 to 2025.
ValevâÂÂs research has focused on nonlinear and chiral optical effects in nanostructured materials. In 2009, he and his colleagues used second-harmonic generation imaging to study electromagnetic responses in G-shaped gold nanostructures, introducing what they described as electromagnetic chiral hotspots. Later work from Valev and co-authors demonstrated sub-wavelength metal reshaping associated with temperature increases in plasmonic hotspots. ValevâÂÂs group has experimentally demonstrated several nonlinear chiral optical effects that were theoretically predicted decades earlier by David L. Andrews. This includes Hyper Rayleigh Scattering Optical Activity, Hyper-Mie Optical Activity, Hyper-Tyndall Optical Activity, and Hyper-Raman Optical Activity.