Related papers: Heat meets light on the nanoscale
Thermal transport in nanostructures plays a critical role in modern technologies. As devices shrink, techniques that can measure thermal properties at nanometer and nanosecond scales are increasingly needed to capture transient,…
Light carries energy and momentum. It can therefore alter the motion of objects from atomic to astronomical scales. Being widely available, readily controllable and broadly biocompatible, light is also an ideal tool to propel microscopic…
The field of attosecond nanophysics, combining the research areas of attosecond physics with nanoscale physics, has experienced a considerable rise in recent years both experimentally and theoretically. Its foundation rests on the sub-cycle…
The interaction of light with subwavelength metallic nano-structures is at the heart of different current scientific hot topics, namely plasmonics, metamaterials and nanoantennas. Research in these disciplines during the last decade has…
Nanotechnology enables in principle a precise mapping from design to device but relied so far on human intuition and simple optimizations. In nanophotonics, a central question is how to make devices in which the light-matter interaction…
The past decade has seen great advances in developing color centers in diamond for sensing, quantum information processing, and tests of quantum foundations. Increasingly, the success of these applications as well as fundamental…
Heat dissipation is one of the most serious problems in modern integrated electronics with the continuously decreasing devices size. Large portion of the consumed power is inevitably dissipated in the form of waste heat which not only…
Optical lattices have emerged as ideal simulators for Hubbard models of strongly correlated materials, such as the high-temperature superconducting cuprates. In optical lattice experiments, microscopic parameters such as the interaction…
Topological photonics seeks to control the behaviour of the light through the design of protected topological modes in photonic structures. While this approach originated from studying the behaviour of electrons in solid-state materials, it…
Energy transport theories are being revisited at the nanoscale, as macroscopic laws known since a century are broken at dimensions smaller than those associated with energy carriers. For thermal radiation, where the typical dimension is…
Localized plasmons formed in ultrathin metallic nanogaps can lead to robust absorption of incident light. Plasmonic metasurfaces based on this effect can efficiently generate energetic charge carriers, also known as hot electrons, owing to…
In the past twenty years, we have reached a broad understanding of many light-driven phenomena in nanoscale systems. The temporal dynamics of the excited states are instead quite challenging to explore, and, at the same time, crucial to…
Light beams can be symmetric under different transformations: translations, rotations, mirror symmetries, duality transformations, etc. In this thesis, a systematic way of characterizing these symmetries is presented. Then, it is shown that…
Correlative light and electron microscopy promises to combine molecular specificity with nanoscale imaging resolution. However, there are substantial technical challenges including reliable co-registration of optical and electron images,…
Quantum entanglement is the basic resource for most quantum information schemes. A fundamental problem of using photonic states as carriers of quantum information is that they interact weakly with matter and that the interaction volume is…
Nature-inspired devices and architectures are attracting considerable attention for various purposes, including the development of novel computing techniques based on spatiotemporal dynamics, exploiting stochastic processes for computing,…
Electrical control of light in integrated photonics is central to a wide range of research and applications. It is conventionally achieved with thermo-optic tuning, but this suffers from high energy consumption and crosstalk.…
The integration of nanoscale electronics with conventional optical devices is restricted by the diffraction limit of light. Metals can confine light at the subwavelength scales needed, but they are lossy, while dielectric materials do not…
An important goal of modern condensed matter physics involves the search for states of matter with new emergent properties and desirable functionalities. Although the tools for material design remain relatively limited, notable advances…
Surface plasmon resonances of metallic nanostructures offer great opportunities to guide and manipulate light on the nanoscale. In the design of novel plasmonic devices, a central topic is to clarify the intricate relationship between the…