Nanophotonics with plasmonic metamaterials
Vladimir P. Drachev
Department of Physics
University of North Texas, Denton TX
Light-matter interaction at the nanometer scale has turned into a very fast growing field of research known as nano-optics and nano-photonics. The first main motivation behind such enthusiasm comes from the potential of nano-optics to extend concepts and functionalities of conventional optics down to the nanometer scale, towards ultra-compact photonic devices that may overcome the diffraction limit. Beyond miniaturization, additional motivation arises from the rich and new physics involved when a material object interacting with light is downsized to dimensions that are much smaller than the light wavelength. Finally, research activity in nanoplasmonics and metamaterials is attractive due to potential applications in the areas of chip-scale and high-integration-density optical interconnects, advanced materials for photovoltaics, and bio-medicine.
I will present several examples of our recent accomplishments in this field. We study the cooperative interaction of continuously pumped few-emitter ensembles interacting with a single damped cavity below the lasing threshold, which represents a new class of photon sources with non-trivial statistical properties. The current results show superradiance and sub-radiance modes in the theoretically predicted bi-exponential luminescence decay of light emitters placed near hyperbolic metamaterials. In such a system an antibunching minimum at near zero correlation time for a single dye emission can switch to the bunching for several dyes coupled to the plasmonic nanoantennas. The physical origin of the bunching for small number of dyes can be microscopically explained by emission of superradiant photon pairs.
Another project deals with Co nanoparticles, which constitute a promising nanomaterial for bio-applications and opto-electronics due to their magnetic properties. The magnetic selective synthesis of Co nanoparticles was developed. We found that the fabricated magnetic nanoparticles show plasmon resonance in the ultraviolet range with a comparable quality factor to the best plasmonic material, Ag, at 400 nm. This finding enables resonance surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy of many bio-molecules, which have optical resonances in the ultraviolet spectral range.
Short Bio:
Vladimir Drachev is an Associate Professor at Department of Physics, University of North Texas; an associate editor for Optical Materials Express. He received the M.S. degree in physics from Novosibirsk State University, Russia, in 1980, and the Ph.D. degree in experimental physics from Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Semiconductor Physics and Institute of Automation&Electrometry, in 1995. From 1999 to 2001, he was a visiting scientist at New Mexico State University, and a senior scientist at Birck Nanotechnology Center and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University for 10 years till 2012. Current research interests include nanophotonics, nanofabrication, optics, nonlinear optics and spectroscopy of plasmonic nanostructures, and applications in biosensing and metamaterials.