Hosted by: Chuck Black

For nanostructures to act as building blocks for next-generation technologies, we need to understand how they interact with light when key parameters such as shape, size and carrier density are tuned. Moreover, equally important is to know how the nanostructure's near-field environment also modifies its properties. In my talk, I will cover several examples where careful tuning of nanoarchitectured systems â€" fabricated by a combination of chemical and physical techniques such as hydrothermal growth, atomic layer deposition and pulsed laser deposition coupled to high-resolution electron beam lithography â€" leads to insights about tailoring light-matter interaction in various fields. These studies, performed in conjunction with advanced in-situ optical, electronic and structural characterization and verified with full-field 3D electromagnetic simulations, will include (i) using subwavelength, highly crystalline nanospheres to fabricate a solution-processed thin-film laser with thickness and energy-input threshold at least an order of magnitude lower than previously demonstrated; (ii) fabricating large-scale areas of nanostructured photocatalysts with a light-absorbing core and surface-active shell heterostructures for enhanced water-splitting activity, where we also disentangle and quantify the respective bulk and surface contributions; (iii) designing and characterizing hybrid optical nanomodulators with an active volume of only 0.002 µm3, achieved by spatially confining light on the nanometer length scale using plasmonic nanostructures while simultaneously controlling the reactive near-field environment at their optical focus with single, precisely positioned phase-change nanostructures.