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

Optical modes engineering in metallic and dielectric nanoparticles could open new paths for assisting chemical transformations using sunlight. In recent years, we have investigated these phenomena at the single nanoparticle level in order to unravel the mechanisms inducing catalytic transformations at these illuminated interfaces. Here I will show how gaining a nanoscopic insight of these...

Surface plasmons in metallic nanoparticles can couple with vibrational modes in molecules, resulting in hybrid light-matter states. The formation of these hybrid states can be exploited to develop new photochemical processes. The frequency of surface plasmon resonances in plasmonic nanoparticles is inherently linked to the size and geometry of the particle. Such a dependence on nanostructure...

Plasmonic nanoparticles have recently emerged as promising photocatalysts for light-driven chemical conversions. The illumination of these particles results in the generation of highly energetic charge carriers, elevated nanoparticle surface temperatures, and strongly enhanced electric fields around the nanoparticle. Distinguishing between these different physical mechanisms is of paramount...

Single organic molecules hold great promise for generating, manipulating, and storing single photons. Such processes form the basis for new quantum-enhanced technologies such as sensing, communications, and computation. In this talk I will focus on a particularly promising molecule – dibenzoterrylene (DBT). When DBT is introduced into a solid crystal of anthracene it is photostable and emits...

Defect-induced sub-bandgap single photon emission (SPE) from hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) is hugely interesting for quantum technology applications, opening a promising route for the design of next-generation single-photon sources [1]. We present our latest data that improves the control and scalability of emitters hosted in large-area h-BN films; bringing closer the possibility of...

In recent years, solid-state quantum emitters have gained increased interest as building blocks for quantum networks, quantum metrology and nanosensors. For all these applications, strong light-matter interactions are essential.
A versatile tool to achieve such interactions is an optical nanofiber, which is the tapered part of a commercial optical fiber that has a subwavelength diameter...

The Rabi splitting between the longitudinal plasmons gold nano-bipyramids and the A exciton of monolayer MoS₂ was investigated. This was done at the single particle level and at room temperature. Dark field spectra were correlated with SEM images, revealing the dimensions of the nanoparticles, such as their length, aspect ratio and tip radii. The effects discovered were also...

Over the past few decades there has been an extraordinary progress in the field of photonics and optoelectronics, which has led to the development of various materials and devices capable of manipulating and controlling the generation, transmission and transduction of light. The phenomenon of luminescence is exploited for large scale applications such as light emitting diodes (LEDs), optical...

We present a fluorescent wave-guiding micro-structured architecture on glass entirely elaborated by sol-gel processing. This architecture is composed of a channel waveguide doped with an oxygen sensitive fluorophore (Rudpp) and endowed with diffraction gratings. It particularly takes advantage of a high refractive index titanium oxide based sol-gel photoresist that can be imprinted through a...

The zinc gallate spinel (ZnGa2O4) has been widely studied for optical applications such as flat panel displays [1], in vivo bio-imaging [2], optoelectronics [3] or anti-counterfeiting applications [4].
For the first time, transparent polycrystalline ZnGa2O4 ceramics were synthesized at the IRCER laboratory, by combining high-energy ball milling, solid-state reaction and spark plasma sintering...

Diffusion of excited-state energy is a key process in both photosynthesis and in organic optoelectronic devices. In organic heterojunction photovoltaic devices, the formed excitons must migrate to an interface, where charge transfer states are present, and then dissociate into free charge carriers. However, the diffusion length of excitons in organic materials is short compared to the optical...

Transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) monolayers are direct-bandgap semiconductors with two valleys in their band structure. The broken inversion symmetry of the lattice gives rise to optical selection rules that enable valley-selective excitation of electrons using circularly polarized light. A strong Coulomb interaction results in the subsequent formation of neutral and charged excitons...

Light-emitting electrochemical cells (LECs) are efficient, air-stable, low-cost, and single-layered lighting sources fabricated using sustainable solution-based techniques. They consist of two electrodes sandwiching a thin film of electroluminescent material doped with ionic electrolyte, which allows for charge transport, recombination, and light-emission processes. The most commonly employed...

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...

In recent years, there has been much research focusing on tunable plasmonic structures and metamaterials for dynamic nanoscale control of electromagnetic radiation. The response of plasmonic structures is highly dependent on factors set during the fabrication process, including the size, shape, and material composition. The inability to tune the optical response of such structures post...

Since MOS scaling, metallic interconnects causes limitations of data rate and ultrahigh power dissipation. Compared with electrical interconnects, optical interconnects allow higher operation speed and lower power consumption for high-bandwidth-density chip-to-chip interconnects. However, for important components of optoelectronic integration circuits (OEICs) photodetectors does not meet the...

ΖnO is a very promising material for blue/UV optoelectronics as a low-cost, transparent, and conductive semiconductor with a wide direct energy bandgap (3.3 eV) and large exciton binding energy (60 meV) at room temperature. However, being difficult to introduce reproducible and stable p-type impurities in ZnO, which exhibits intrinsically n-type conductivity, it is necessary to rely on...