KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Active Metasurfaces Empowered by 2D-materials

I. Staude Abbe Center of Photonics, Friedrich Schiller University Jena Germany

Brief Bio
Isabelle Staude studied physics at the University of Konstanz, and subsequently received her Ph.D. degree from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, in 2011. For her postdoc, she moved to the Nonlinear Physics Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, where she coordinated the experimental activities on optical nanoantennas and served the nanoplasmonics stream in the Australian Centre of Excellence CUDOS as deputy project leader. She returned to Germany in mid-2015 to establish a junior research group on functional photonic nanostructures at the Institute of Applied Physics and the Abbe Center of Photonics at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. She received an Emmy-Noether Grant from the German research Foundation as well as the Hertha Sponer Prize 2017 from the German Physical Society. In November 2017, she became a junior professor at the same institution. She was promoted to a full professor in April 2020.

Abstract
Optical metasurfaces, two-dimensional arrangements of designed nanoresonators, offer unique opportunities for controlling light fields and for tailoring the interaction of light with nanoscale matter. Due to their flat nature, their integration with two-dimensional materials consisting of only a single molecular layer is particularly interesting. This talk reviews our recent and ongoing activities in hybridizing optical metasurfaces composed of resonant metallic or dielectric building blocks with different types of two-dimensional materials, including monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (2D-TMDs) and carbon nanomembranes (CNMs). On the one hand, we will show that CNMs can serve as mechanically stable substrates for free-standing metasurface architectures of nanoscale thickness. On the other hand, we will demonstrate that the ability of the nanoresonators to concentrate light into nanoscale volumes can be utilized to carefully control the properties, such as pattern and polarization, of light emitted by 2D-TMDs via photoluminescence or nonlinear processes. Here, the ability of tailored nanostructures to interact selectively with exciton populations located at inequivalent conduction band minima at the corners of the 2D-TMD’s Brillouin zone is of particular interest. Such a selective interaction is an important prerequisite for the realization of future miniaturized valleytronic devices.

Cross-grating Phase Microscopy for Nanophotonics

Guillaume Baffou Institut Fresnel France

Brief Bio
Guillaume Baffou is a CNRS researcher working at the Fresnel Institute, Marseille (France). He is a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan. He passed the 'agrégation' in physics in 2004 and received his master's degree in solid states physics, from Université Paris XI. After a Ph.D. degree in Nanoscience at the Université Paris XI in 2007, he moved to the ICFO, Castelldefels (Barcelona) for a 3-year long postdoc on plasmonics and associated photothermal effects. In 2010, he was appointed CNRS researcher at the Institut Fresnel, Marseille (France) in the Mosaic group. His activities focus on the use of gold nanoparticules under illuminaton for application in microscale physics, chemistry and biology, and on the use of quantitative phase microscopy as a metrology tool for nanophotonics and biomicroscopy. Guillaume Baffou was awarded the Bronze Medal of the CNRS in 2015. In 2018, he obtained an ERC Consolidator grant to lead research activities at the interface between physics and biology at small scales.

Abstract
Quantitative phase microscopies (QPM) are currently getting popular in the burgeoning research field of bioimaging. Surprisingly, mainly biologists found an interest in mapping the phase a light beam, not really physicists. This presentation will aim to explain the interest physicists could find upon imaging the phase of light, and especially in the nanophotonics community. First, the working principle of cross-grating phase microscopy (CGM) will be explained, a simple, high-sensitivity QPM. Then, I'll review the recent achievements we made using CGM in the field of nanophotonics, namely, for full optical characterization of nanoparticles, 2D materials and metasurfaces, and for the quantitative imaging of microscale temperature profiles created by gold nanoparticles under illumination.

Light Emission in Extreme Nanocavities: From Intramolecular Resolution to Complex Single Photon Emission

Javier Aizpurua Centro de Física de Materiales and Donostia International Physics Center Spain

Brief Bio
Javier Aizpurua is a research Professor at the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), and head of the “Theory of Nanophotonics Group” at the Center for Materials Physics in San Sebastian, the Basque Country. After finishing his doctorate thesis on the interaction of fast electrons and nanoparticles and two postdoctoral positions in Sweden and USA, in 2006 he set up his theoretical group in San Sebastian. Aizpurua’s team has developed key concepts to understand light-matter interaction at the nanoscale in a variety of optical and infrared spectroscopy and microscopy configurations, with particular emphasis on the study of quantum effects in plasmonics. He has published more than 200 papers on nanooptics, including breakthroughs in the description of tunneling optoelectronics, and molecular optomechanics.

Abstract
The use of plasmonic cavities has been exploited during the last years to engineer light emission from single molecules and quantum dots. The weak coupling regime has allowed for increasing the decay rate of emitters (Purcell effect) as well as for modifying their emission energy (Lamb shift). In the strong coupling regime, hybrid polaritonic states can be formed, producing a spectral split in light emission, with the corresponding complexity in the excited states dynamics.
Here we present a study of the emission from a single free-base phthalocyanine in a tunnelling junction, as those used in Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy (STM), where electroluminescence maps of the intensity, broadening, and energy shift of the emission reveal atomic-scale resolution. A combination of the electromagnetic field at the apex of the tunelling junction (picocavity) together with a full quantum chemistry description of the molecular electronic transition allow for correctly interpreting intramolecular resolution of Purcell factor, Lamb shift and Stark effect maps.
We also explore the statistics of emission of single quantum-dot emitters in plasmonic bowtie nanoantennas by applying a cavity-Quantum Electrodynamics (c-QED) framework, which serves to identify the role of quantum-dot dark states as key elements to explain the complex dynamics of their light emission as well as its statistics.

SCOPE

The interaction between light and small clusters of nanoscale metallic and/or dielectric components has been a recent subject of extensive experimental and theoretical research. Knowledge and understanding of the near- and far-field optical responses from individual and coupled nanoparticles have led to an unprecedented development in the fields of molecular optics, optical antenna design, surface enhanced spectroscopies, bio/chemical sensing, light guiding, solar cell system, information storage and other. Research of light-matter interaction at the nanoscale now presents an opportunity to build on the existing work or/and establish novel directions for this area of research.

We invite researchers to contribute with original research ideas that will stimulate the continuing reports to exploit the great potential that light-matter interaction have for real life applications but also to develop this field for future nanophotonic devices.

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