Title: Controlling Light–matter Interactions with Plasmonic and Dielectric Architectures
When: Thursday, February 13, 2025, 12:00
Place: Department of Physics of Materials Science, Faculty of Sciences, Module 4, Seminar Room (5th Floor)
Speaker: Christos Tserkezis POLIMA—Center for Polariton-driven Light–Matter Interactions, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark.
Controlling and enhancing light–matter interactions plays a major role in a wide variety of technologies, from imaging and sensing to optical communications and quantum computing. The rapid advances in nanofabrication in the last 20 years have opened tremendous opportunities for unprecedented control of such interactions at the nanoscale, through a variety of different nanophotonic environment, that can modify the emission from nanoscopic light sources such as atoms, molecules, or larger biological complexes, but also artificial atoms such as quantum wells and dots, or defects in three- and two-dimensional nanostructures. Increasing the strength of the light–matter interaction, it is even possible to create hybrid states with a combined light/matter character, so-called polaritons. Here I will discuss some of our recent activities related to both the weak-coupling regime, where the decay rate of excited emitters is affected by a structured environment via the Purcell effect, and to the strong-coupling regime, where polaritons of different characters will be analysed. Focus will be placed on metallic nanoparticles, and the quantum corrections that need be included in their description when entering the extreme nanoscale, dielectric nanoparticles dominated by Mie resonances, and nanoparticles made of topological insulators, where surface states open new opportunities for bridging the so-called THz gap.
