Controlling the physical and electronic properties of materials through optics holds significant appeal for both foundational scientific exploration and the advancement of optoelectronic technologies. A natural progression involves scaling down devices to the nanoscale, necessitating a reduction in the volume of optical interactions to the nanoscale. Optical antennas, though capable of confining light, fall short due to the requirement of illuminating them with a diffraction-limited focal spot, resulting in unintentional illumination of the sample over a larger volume. In contrast, plasmon nanofocusing physically separates the illumination and the nano-light generation sites, enabling background-free and truly confined nano-light. Furthermore, being a non-resonant phenomenon, plasmon nanofocusing is wavelength-independent, allowing for the generation of nano-light across a broad spectrum of wavelengths or even a white nano-light, suitable for nanoscale multi-sensing and optical switching applications. This talk will cover the generation of background-free, wavelength-independent nano-light and its potential applications in nanoscale sensing and optical switching.
Plasmon nanofocusing enables to create an intense nanoscale light source through super-focusing of plasmons propagating on a metallic tapered structure toward its apex. Among various unique characteristics of plasmon nanofocusing, the broadband property has recently been gaining attention in the nanophotonics field, owing to several successful applications such as broadband super-resolution spectral imaging. Here, we introduce a more active way to apply broadband plasmon nanofocusing, which is nanoscale optical switching of electronic states of photochromic materials by ultraviolet and visible plasmon nanofocusing. We will also introduce a few more new applications of broadband plasmon nanofocusing such as absorption sensing.
Plasmon nanofocusing has been gaining much attention as a tool to create a nanoscale light source over a broad wavelength range. The nanoscale light source is generated by plasmons propagating on a tapered plasmonic structure toward its apex, which eventually induces a strong light source at the apex in a nanometric volume. It has recently been recognized as a broadband plasmon phenomenon because it is just based on plasmon propagation. We have recently reported the generation of white nanolight source and its application for broadband scattering spectral near-field optical imaging. We will talk more about recent advances that we made using the broadband property of plasmon nanofocusing.
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