Light offers unique ways to relay information with high speed and minimal noise due to its weak interaction with matter and minimal cross-talk between optical channels. However, in order to control photonic information, one often seeks to enhance the interaction between light and matter. This enhancement helps produce light, encode information, control its flow using switches and gates or convert the information to a different carrier, for example, an electronic signal. Nanoscale metallic and/or dielectric structures such as resonators, antennas, waveguides or couplers offers unparalleled flexibility in controlling light at rates approaching the THz range and within volumes smaller than the wavelength of light. Nanolasers, metasurfaces, optical nanoswitches and plasmon-enhanced detectors are all examples of this versatility, enabled by coupling light to the free and bound electronic charges in nanophotonic structures. By specially designing and realizing these structures, we target applications in nanoscale photonic sensing [1] and quantum photonics [2].
References
[1] S.K.H. Andersen, S. Bogdanov, Y. Xuan, O. Makarova, M.Y. Shalaginov, A. Boltasseva, V.M. Shalaev and S. Bozhevolnyi, ACS Photonics, 5, 692 (2018)
[2] O.A. Makarova, M.Y. Shalaginov, S. Bogdanov, U. Guler, A. Boltasseva, A.V. Kildishev and V.M. Shalaev, Optics Letters 42, 3968 (2017)
Quantum and Nanoscale Photonics Lab 