Month: November 2022

The work in collaboration with Paris Saclay University and La Sapienza in Rome, has been published in ACS Nano.

We have demonstrated a thermal transducer capable to detect strong light-matter interaction by monitoring heat dissipation in a quantum well sandwiched between an antenna and a thermally expanding material.

The result is interesting because the technique does not rely on far-field analysis (often difficult to achieve) and also opens the way to exploit dissipative dynamics in cavity-embedded quantum systems.

See more: https://pubs.acs.org/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1021/acsnano.2c04452&ref=pdf

Many processes depend superlinearly on light intensity (that is: two photons are more than twice as better as one). This work shows how to efficiently design lossless ultrathin dielectric optical metasurfaces to achieve extremely large light intensities. The concept can benefit nonlinear optical processes such as photothermal catalysis, light-driven desalination or higher-harmonics generation.

Interestingly, we also show that sometimes it is better to give up some input power (i.e., lose some energy) if that translates into more local field intensities.

Thanks to Yage Zhao and Ming Zhang and great collaboration with Nordlander’s group

Fast Topology Optimization for Near-Field Focusing All-Dielectric Metasurfaces Using the Discrete Dipole Approximation