Title: Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and Plasmon Lattices with Gain
When: Wednesday, April 9, 2025, 11:00
Place: Department of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics, Faculty of Sciences, Module 5, Seminar Room (5th Floor)
Speaker: Femius Koenderink, AMOLF, Amsterdam
Nanophotonics is the science of chip-scale control over the generation, routing, and processing of light, and is pursued to strongly couple light and matter. Currently, much effort goes into so-called metasurfaces: Thin patterned surfaces that are strongly scattering, with scattering cross sections much larger than their physical size. They are on one hand pursued for engineering, e.g. promising control over incoming light beams through near-arbitrary reshaping of wavefronts by means of scattering, and promising brighter and directional light sources. On the other hand, 2D strongly scattering periodic systems can also be photonic analogons of seminal tight-binding Hamiltonians, with the advantage that they can be designed at will, can be imbued with gain and loss, and can be studied and controlled in space and time with powerful optical microscopy methods. In this context I will present work on plasmonic lattices with gain. I will present how we study the band structure physics of this system in the lab, will discuss the emergence of lasing, and then will present a study of spontaneous symmetry breaking in this photonic lattice. We use wavefront shaping techniques to control the size, shape and boundary conditions at will, allowing rich insight in the spontaneous emergence of coherence of amplifying nonlocal metasurfaces.
