Strong Light-Matter Coupling and Polariton Lasing in Metallic and Dielectric Metasurfaces
Jaime Gomez Rivas, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
(Non-)Reciprocity and Nanotechnology: Demonstration of a Nonlinear Optical Diode
Olivier Martin, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Optical Tomographic Imaging of Acoustically Levitated Biological Samples
Monika Ritsch-Marte, Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria
Strong Light-Matter Coupling and Polariton Lasing in Metallic and Dielectric Metasurfaces
Jaime Gomez Rivas
Eindhoven University of Technology
Netherlands
www.surfacephotonics.org
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Brief Bio
Jaime Gómez Rivas received his PhD in 2002 at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) for his work on light transport in disordered media. From 2002 until 2005, Gómez Rivas worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the RWTH Aachen (Germany) on THz spectroscopy, initiating the field of THz plasmonics. In 2005, he became a project leader at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF) in Amsterdam, leading the group Surface Photonics. This group was located at Philips Research in Eindhoven (The Netherlands) to bring blue-sky research into applications. Gómez Rivas group pioneered the work of plasmonics for solid-state lighting. In 2010 Gómez Rivas became a part-time professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and group leader at AMOLF. After 10 years of fruitful collaboration with Philips, the group of Gómez Rivas moved in 2015 to the TU/e and the Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research (DIFFER) and in 2018 fully to the TU/e, where it works on strong light-matter coupling, polaritonic devices, and THz metasurfaces. Gómez Rivas is co-founder of the start-up TeraNova B.V. dedicated to the development and commercialization of THz technology. He is co-author of more than 150 peer-reviewed articles and co-inventor of more than 20 patents. He has served in numerous evaluation and scientific commissions, and since 2015 he is associate editor of the Journal of Applied Physics. Gómez Rivas has also received several prestigious grants and awards, such as ERC starting and Proof of Concept grants, NWO-VICI, FOM-IPP, and Facebook Academy Award.
Abstract
Metallic and dielectric nanoparticles behave as resonators with resonant frequencies determined by their size, shape and composition. When these resonators are placed in periodic arrays, they can radiatively couple through in-plane diffraction orders, forming non-local metasurfaces with collective modes called surface lattice resonances (SLRs). SLRs lead to large field enhancements over extended areas, offering an ideal platform for strong-light matter coupling and optoelectronic applications. In this presentation, I will discuss the coupling of SLRs with excitons in organic molecules to form exciton-polaritons (EPs). EPs can condense to the ground state, leading to a coherent emission known as polariton lasing. The threshold for condensation depends on the different mechanism assisting the relaxation of excitons to EPs, and the optical losses of SLRs, which can be controlled through the choice of materials and the symmetries in the system.
(Non-)Reciprocity and Nanotechnology: Demonstration of a Nonlinear Optical Diode
Olivier Martin
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Switzerland
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Brief Bio
Olivier J.F. Martin studied physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and conducted his PhD at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, where he studied semiconductor lasers. After a stay at the UC San Diego, he became Assistant Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ). In 2003 he was appointed at the EPFL, where he is currently Full Professor of Nanophotonics and Optical Signal Processing. Dr. Martin conducts a comprehensive research that combines the development of numerical techniques for the solution of Maxwell’s equations with advanced nanofabrication and experiments on plasmonic systems. Applications of his research include optical antennas, metasurfaces, nonlinear optics, optical nano-manipulations, heterogeneous catalysis, security features and optical forces at the nanoscale. Dr. Martin has authored over 300 journal articles and holds several patents and invention disclosures.
Abstract
Progress in nanotechnology enables interesting experiments that can test some fundamental laws of physics. Among them, reciprocity has attracted a lot of interest recently, probably because optical isolators – a non-reciprocal device that lets the light pass only in one direction – are ubiquitous to any optical table, where they prevent light to couple back into a laser. Using integrated plasmonic systems to mimic this behavior is therefore of great interest. In this presentation, I will first clarify the concept of reciprocity in optics and illustrate some of the pitfalls in its utilization. Then, I will demonstrate a nonlinear plasmonic metasurface that exhibits strongly asymmetric second-harmonic generation: nonlinear scattering is efficient upon excitation in one direction and is substantially suppressed when the excitation direction is reversed, thus enabling a diode-like functionality. A 10 dB extinction ratio of SHG upon opposite excitations is measured experimentally and those findings are substantiated with full-wave simulations. This behavior is obtained through the combination of two different plasmonic metals – aluminium and silver – deposited in a tandem-like configuration and resulting into a bianisotropic response of the system, as confirmed by performing a homogenization analysis and extracting the effective susceptibility tensor. Finally, I will discuss the implications of these results from the perspectives of reciprocity and time-reversal asymmetry.
Optical Tomographic Imaging of Acoustically Levitated Biological Samples
Monika Ritsch-Marte
Medical University of Innsbruck
Austria
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Brief Bio
Monika Ritsch-Marte received her M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Innsbruck in 1984 and her PhD in Quantum Optics from the Waikato University in New Zealand (under the supervision of D.F. Walls) in 1988. After several PostDoc projects (Boulder/Colorado, Milano, Helsinki), and after completing her Habilitation at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Innsbruck, she accepted the Chair of Biomedical Physics at the Medical University in Innsbruck in 1998 where she founded a Biomedical Optics group. Her research interest focuses on wavefront shaping, to advance holographic optical tweezers, digital holographic microscopy, linear and non-linear Raman microscopy and deep tissue imaging. She has received numerous research grants and awards, including an ERC Advanced Grant and the Boltzmann Award of the Austrian Physical Society and the Emmy Noether Award of the European Physical Society. She is a member of the Austrian Academy of Science, the German Academy Leopoldina, and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.
Scientific Output:
Prof. Ritsch-Marte has published more than 140 peer-reviewed papers, she holds several patents. Her h-index is 55 (i10 index 118) according to google scholar (January 2024).
Abstract
Acoustic levitation presents a powerful alternative to optical tweezers for the manipulation of heavier biological samples, such as organoids, cancer spheroids or early stage developing organisms. It offers several advantages including contact-free handling and direct access to the samples. By utilizing actuated acoustic waves, it is possible to hold, rotate, and reorient the samples to enable tomographic imaging and 3D reconstruction. A significant challenge of this approach lies in the fact that projection directions are sample-dependent and are not precisely known a priori.
As an example, optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging of a zebrafish embryo will be discussed, demonstrating the suppression of severe attenuation artifacts in the 3D reconstruction. This highlights the huge potential of the approach for answering questions in development biology and in organoid and cancer spheroid research.