Event Type: IFIMAColloquium
Title: On single photons and single molecules: from nano-quantum optics to nanobiophotonics
When: Friday, 10th May, 2024, at 12:00h
Where: Conference Room, Module 00, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Speaker: Vahid Sandoghdar, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light & Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin, Erlangen, Germany.
Light-matter interaction at the nanometer scale lies at the heart of elementary optical processes such as absorption, emission or scattering. Over the past two decades, we have realized a series of experiments to investigate the interaction of single photons, single molecules and single nanoparticles. In this presentation, I will report on recent studies, where we reach unity efficiency in the coupling of single photons to single molecules in a microcavity and describe our efforts to exploit this for the realization of polaritonic states involving a controlled number of molecules and photons. Furthermore, I will show how the underlying mechanisms that play a central role in quantum optics, help detect, image and track single biological nanoparticles such as viruses and small proteins with high spatial and temporal resolutions and in a label-free fashion.
