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Nanoscale solid-solid contacts define a wealth of material behaviours from the electrical and thermal conductivity in modern electronic devices to friction and losses in micro- and nanoelectromechanical systems. For modern ultra-high…
Photonic chips that integrate guides, switches, gratings and other components, process vast amounts of information rapidly on a single device. A new branch of this technology becomes possible if the light is coupled to cold atoms in a…
Harnessing the optical properties of noble metals down to the nanometer-scale is a key step towards fast and low-dissipative information processing. At the 10-nm length scale, metal crystallinity and patterning as well as probing of surface…
We propose a novel experimental probe for cold atomic gases analogous to the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) in condensed matter. This probe uses the coherent coupling of a single particle to the system. Depending on the measurement…
Scanning probe microscopy is one of the most versatile windows into the nanoworld, providing imaging access to a variety of sample properties, depending on the probe employed. Tunneling probes map electronic properties of samples, magnetic…
The ability to actively regulate heat flow at the nanoscale could be a game changer for applications in thermal management and energy harvesting. Such a breakthrough could also enable the control of heat flow using thermal circuits, in a…
Stable and switchable polarization of ferroelectric materials opens a possibility to electrically control their functional behavior. A particularly promising approach is to employ ferroelectric tunnel junctions where the polarization…
Energy and charge transfer across metal-semiconductor interfaces are the fundamental driving forces for a broad range of applications, such as computing, energy harvesting, and photodetection. However, the exact roles and physical…
Electrically-contacted optical gap antennas are nanoscale interface devices enabling the transduction between photons and electrons. This new generation of devices captures visible to near infrared electromagnetic radiation and converts the…
Recent experiments demonstrate a temperature control of the electric conduction through a ferrocene-based molecular junction. Here we examine the results in view of determining means to distinguish between transport through single-particle…
Understanding the interplay between illumination and the electron distribution in metallic nanostructures is a crucial step towards developing applications such as plasmonic photo-catalysis for green fuels, nano-scale photo-detection and…
Surface plasmons on metals can concentrate light into sub-nanometric volumes and on these near atomic length scales the electronic response at the metal interface is smeared out over a Thomas-Fermi screening length. This nonlocality is a…
Temperature is a fundamental parameter in the study of physical phenomena. At the nanoscale, local temperature differences can be harnessed to design novel thermal nanoelectronic devices or test quantum thermodynamical concepts. Determining…
The near field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) is not only a tool for imaging of objects in the sub wavelength limit but also a prominent characteristic tool for understanding the intrinsic properties of the nanostructures. The effect of…
This review presents recent results on the physics of electron transport in molecular devices. The review is organized as follows. A brief description of molecular junction (MJ) technology is first given followed by an introduction to the…
We present a novel technique to remotely measure and control the local temperature within a medium. This technique is based on the observation of the rotational Brownian motion of gold nanocrescent particles, which possess a strong…
Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) has advanced rapidly in the last decade thanks to the ability to correct the major aberrations of the probe forming lens. Now atomic-sized beams are routine, even at accelerating voltages as…
We report measurements of the electron transport through atomic-scale constrictions and tunnel junctions between ferromagnetic electrodes. Structures are fabricated using a combination of e-beam lithography and controlled electromigration.…
Electrical excitation of light using inelastic electron tunneling is a promising approach for the realization of ultra-compact on-chip optical sources with high modulation bandwidth. However, the practical implementation of these nanoscale…
Typical measurements of nanowire devices rely on end-to-end measurements to reveal mesoscopic phenomena such as quantized conductance or Coulomb blockade. However, creating nanoscale tunnel junctions allows one to directly measure other…