Sculpting Light across the Galaxy: From Plasmons in Single Nanoparticles to Valley Excitons in Atomically Thin Semiconductors

Photonic structures sculpt light by controlling phase, polarization, amplitude, and confinement at subwavelength scales, significantly enhancing light-matter interactions. This control drives advances in super-resolution microscopy, single-molecule measurements, single-photon nonlinearity, and polariton chemistry. This seminar explores how nano- and micro-cavities temporally or spatially concentrate light to amplify these interactions. I will first discuss ultrahigh-quality-factor microcavity-based spectrometers probing plasmonic-photonic interactions across a wide range of energy scales and microfluidic cavities tailoring these dynamics. In the second part, I will present high-quality-factor chiral metasurfaces—arrays of Si chiral meta-atoms—that enable room-temperature valley-selective emission in atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenides.