Quantum dots metamaterials
The control of spontaneous emission in photonic structures relies on enhanced light-matter interactions due to field localisation and large interaction times. As such, nanostructured plasmonic materials are well suited for this purpose because they offer strong field confinement and can be engineered to support good coupling to free space, thereby opening up a way towards applications such as quantum information devices, solar-energy harvesting, efficient photo-detection, and biological markers. In this talk I will present some of our recent experimental results on coupling of quantum dots to plasmonic structures such as nanoantennas and magnetic metamaterials.
In particular I will show how quantum dots can couple to simultaneously into both electric and magnetic modes of a metamaterial. Sharp differences in the interaction of the quantum dots with the magnetic and the electric metamaterial mode has been demonstrated, paving a way towards loss-compensated metamaterials and metamaterial nanolasers.
Biography
Dragomir Neshev received the Ph.D. degree in physics from Sofia University, Bulgaria in 1999. Since then he has worked in the field of nonlinear optics at several research centres around the world. Since 2002, he has been with the Australian National University, where he is currently an Associate Professor. He is the project leader on Functional Metamaterials at the Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh-bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) and leads the Experimental Photonics group at the Nonlinear Physics Centre. He is the recipient of a number of awards, including a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship (ARC, 2010) an Australian Research Fellowship (ARC, 2004), a Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship (European Commission, 2001), and the Academic award for best young scientist (Sofia University, 1999). His activities span over several branches of optics, including nonlinear periodic structures, singular optics, plasmonics, and photonic metamaterials.