Controlling light at the nanoscale with plasmonic metamaterials
Event details
| Date | 31.05.2010 |
| Hour | 16:15 |
| Speaker | Prof. Dr. Albert Polman. Institute AMOLF, Amsterdam |
| Location |
Auditoire CE 4 - Centre Est
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Light is a fascinating phenomenon. It determines how we observe the world around us, and vice versa, gives us control over the world around us. Many aspects of our lives are controlled by light: we use the internet that is based on optical communication, we watch movies from DVDs made by optical recording, our homes are artificially lighted and we use light from the sun for the generation of energy.
There are limits to the degree by which we can control light. Light can only be effectively focused, guided and manipulated on a length scale that is larger than the wavelength. For many applications of light this limitation does not pose a problem. Recently, however, it is being realized that some very intriguing novel physical phenomena would become observable if we could control light on a scale well below the wavelength. Control over light at this small scale will also enable applications that have never been foreseen before.
In this presentation I will discuss how we can achieve control over light at the nanoscale, i.e. some 10-100 times smaller than the wavelength of visible light. I will discuss a novel class of materials, called “metamaterials” in which the propagation of light is not determined by the chemical materials composition as is traditionally the case, but by sub-wavelength structure that is artificially made in the materials. As a result it becomes possible to engineer the flow of light in ways that are impossible to achieve with regular materials...
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