Special Seminar: Nano-photonic in the visible: imaging, trapping, and BEC lasing

The ability to probe and control photon at the nanometer scale not only advances frontiers of fundamental science, but also provides critical prerequisites to applications in imaging, sensing, catalysis, energy harvesting, and more. Exploiting and enhancing the originally weak light-matter interactions via novel photonic structures, we will be able to sense chemical species at single molecule levels, to devise better imaging tools, to transfer data more efficiently at higher speed.

 

In this talk, I will first describe a simple and general nano-optical device developed during my Ph.D., called campanile probe, which lay groundwork for generally-applicable nano-optical studies. Two examples will be discussed, where we cross the boundary from insufficient to sufficient spatial resolution beyond optical diffraction limit and perform optical hyperspectral imaging of luminescence heterogeneity along InP nanowires and synthetic monolayer MoS2. Then I will move further and finish the imaging efforts by showing our newly developed hyperbolic metamaterials approach for fast imaging of biological samples with nanometer resolution. Next, I will focus on our recent experimental demonstration of stable Casimir equilibia, where the quantum fluctuation induced electromagnetic fields between two surfaces is utilized to achieve the first of the kind stable Casimir quantum trapping with zero energy. Following this, I will discuss how to use high quality optical cavities to enhance the strength of light-matter interaction into the strong coupling regime. The formation of the coherently coupled cavity exciton-polariton as well as the Bose Einstein condensation of these bosonic quasiparticles will be shown. Finally, I will conclude the talk by presenting my vision of how these efforts can enable a wide range of capabilities with relevance to bio-imaging, efficient solid-state devices, room temperature quantum simulator, detector and beyond.