EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

Confining and controlling light over sub-diffraction volumes is of extreme importance to widen our understanding of nanoscale light-matter interactions, opening up excellent opportunities in single-molecule detection, energy harvesting, and opto-electronics. Multilayers composed by nm-thick films of metal and dielectric materials support a wide landscape of confined optical modes, which can be excited via coupling with nanoscale diffraction gratings or by local excitations, for instance by using high-energy electron beams. In this framework, we show how disc-shaped multilayered metal-dielectric nanostructures can couple to far-field radiation and enable a full control of absorption and scattering of light at visible and near-infrared frequencies. At the same time, we show that the same nanostructures enable a resonant magnetically-induced modulation of the light polarization by exciting either electric or magnetic optical modes. Moreover, the exploitation of the metal-dielectric interface-induced symmetry breaking has been explored as possible route to achieve enhanced nonlinear optical emission, unlocking promising applications of these architectures as solvable nanostructures to generate visible light by using near-infrared radiation. Finally, we show that metal-dielectric nanostructures can be used as efficient light-to-heat conversion nano-reactors for efficient in-vitro hyperthermia of living cells with negligible cytotoxicity, enhanced single-molecule detection at tens of μg/mL, sensing deep sub-wavelength deformation, and all-optical ultrafast sub-ps modulation of light states at a tailored wavelength with a relative modulation depth exceeding 100%.