Invited Paper EM+MI+MN+NS-ThM1
Extreme Nanophotonics from Ultrathin Metallic Junctions

Thursday, October 25, 2018, 8:00 am, Room 101A

New optical nanomaterials hold the potential for breakthroughs in a wide range of areas from ultrafast optoelectronics such as modulators, light sources and hyperspectral detectors, to efficient upconversion for energy applications, bio-sensing and on-chip components for quantum information science; they also serve as inspiration for entirely new devices and technologies. An exciting opportunity to realize such new nanomaterials lies in controlling the local electromagnetic environment on the atomic- and molecular-scale, (~1-10 nm) which enables extreme field enhancements, but represents a largely unexplored length scale. We use creative nanofabrication techniques at the interface between chemistry and physics to realize this new regime, together with advanced, ultrafast optical techniques to probe the emerging phenomena. Here, I will provide an overview of our recent research demonstrating tailored light-matter interactions by leveraging ultra-small plasmonic cavities fabricated using bottom-up techniques. Examples of our demonstrations include perfect absorbers and combinational colors [Adv. Mat. 27, 7897 (2015), Adv. Mat. 29, 1602971 (2017)], actively tunable nanostructures [Nano Lett., 18, 853 (2018)], tailored emission from two-dimensional semiconductor materials [Nano Lett. 15, 3578 (2015), ACS Phot. 5, 552 (2018)] and strong coupling.