Related papers: Heat meets light on the nanoscale
Photons for quantum technologies have been identified early on as a very good candidate for carrying quantum information encoded onto them, either by polarization encoding, time encoding or spatial encoding. Quantum cryptography, quantum…
Light-matter interactions are an established field that is experiencing a renaissance in recent years due to the introduction of exotic coupling regimes. These include the ultrastrong and deep strong coupling regimes, where the coupling…
In this thesis we propose new, versatile schemes to control light-matter interactions at the nanoscale. In the first part of the thesis, we envisage a new class of plasmonic cloaks made of magneto-optical (MO) materials. We demonstrate that…
Hot tips are used either for characterizing nanostructures by using scanning thermal microscopes or for local heating to assist data writing. The tip-sample thermal interaction involves conduction at solid-solid contact as well as…
Managing the emission and absorption of thermal radiation is crucial for a wide range of technologies, from radiative cooling of buildings and vehicles to thermal regulation of satellites and future lunar and Mars habitats. Despite this…
While the thermal and electromagnetic properties of plasmonic nanostructures are well understood, nanoscale thermometry still presents an experimental and theoretical challenge. Plasmonic structures can confine electromagnetic energy at the…
Advances in the field of plasmonics, that is, nanophotonics based on optical properties of metal nanostructures, paved the way for the development of ultrasensitive biological sensors and other devices whose operating principles are based…
Plasmonic structures are renowned for their capability to efficiently convert light into heat at the nanoscale. However, despite the possibility to generate deep sub-wavelength electromagnetic hot spots, the formation of extremely localized…
We show that, in general, any complex weakly nonlinear highly multimode system can reach thermodynamic equilibrium that is characterized by a unique temperature and chemical potential. The conditions leading to either positive or negative…
The interaction between light and matter can be enhanced by spatially concentrating the light field to boost the photon energy density and increasing the photon dwell time to prolong energy transfer between light and matter. Traditionally,…
Nanoantennas for visible and infrared radiation can strongly enhance the interaction of light with nanoscale matter by their ability to efficiently link propagating and spatially localized optical fields. This ability unlocks an enormous…
Since the advent of optogenetics, technology development has focused on new methods to optically interact with single nervous cells. This gave rise to the field of photonic neural interfaces, intended as the set of technologies that can…
Research in photonic computing has flourished due to the proliferation of optoelectronic components on photonic integration platforms. Photonic integrated circuits have enabled ultrafast artificial neural networks, providing a framework for…
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…
Recent experiments claimed that the enhancement of catalytic reaction rates occurs via the reduction of activation barriers driven by non-equilibrium (``hot'') electrons in plasmonic metal nanoparticles. These experiments place plasmonic…
Following the lifespan of optical excitations from their creation to decay into photons is crucial in understanding materials optical properties. Macroscopically, techniques such as the photoluminescence excitation spectroscopy provide…
The burgeoning field of nanophotonics has grown to be a major research area, primarily because of the ability to control and manipulate single quantum systems (emitters) and single photons on demand. For many years studying nanophotonic…
Intense light-matter interaction largely relies on the use of high-power light sources, creating fields comparable to, or even stronger than, the field keeping the electrons bound in atoms. Under such conditions, the interaction induces…
The physics of light-matter interactions is strongly constrained by both the small value of the fine-structure constant and the small size of the atom. Overcoming these limitations is a long-standing challenge. Recent theoretical and…
We provide an introduction to complex photonic media, that is, composite materials with spatial inhomogeneities that are distributed over length scales comparable to or smaller than the wavelength of light. This blossoming field is firmly…