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Maiken Mikkelsen is a physicist who won the Maria Goeppert Mayer award from the American Physical Society in 2017 for her work in quantum nanophotonics. [1] She is currently the James N. and Elizabeth H. Barton Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering [2] and an associate professor of physics at Duke University.
Maiken Mikkelsen received her B.S. in physics in 2004 from the University of Copenhagen. [1] She received her Ph.D. in physics in 2009 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studied single electron spin dynamics in semiconductors for her Ph.D. thesis and for which she won the 2011 Thesis Prize from the Quantum Electronics and Optical Division (QEOD) of the European Physical Society. [3] She did a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley before joining the faculty at Duke University in 2012. [1]
Mikkelsen's research focuses on light-matter interactions in nanophotonic structures, quantum materials, and novel multi-scale fabrication techniques. Her recent work in "Extreme Nanophotonics" aims to realize unprecedented material properties and behavior by sculpting electromagnetic fields on the molecular scale. [4]
Revealed record-high spontaneous emission rates. Elucidated the mechanisms behind large Purcell factors and demonstrated record-high 1,000-fold enhancement in the spontaneous emission rate of dye molecules and semiconductor quantum dots (Nature Photonics 8, 835 (2014) [15] , Nature Communications 6, 7788 (2015) [16] ).
Realized first ultrafast and efficient single photon source. Realized this long-sought goal by embedding single quantum dots in plasmonic cavities. Critical to quantum information and quantum optics communities, as the natural slow emission rate of single photon sources is a limiting factor for many experiments and future applications (Nano Letters 16, 270 (2016) [17] ).
Demonstrated first ultrafast, spectrally-selective thermal photodetector. Utilized metasurfaces to create spectrally-selective perfect absorption enabling the use of an only 100 nm pyroelectric thermal detection layer and revealing speeds of <700 ps, an improvement of five-orders-of-magnitude over state-of-the-art. The metasurface also acts as an on-chip spectral filter promising for hyperspectral imaging (Nature Materials 19, 158 (2020) [18] ).
Created novel multi-scale fabrication technique to realize large-area structural color. Utilized chemical self-assembly to achieve sub-10 nm gaps between metals to demonstrate spectrally-selective perfect absorbers. Combined with top-down large-scale patterning to realize multi-spectral pixels and ~10,000 plasmonic combinatorial colors. Promising for transformative breakthroughs of e.g. photodetectors and imaging devices (Advanced Materials 27, 8028 (2015) [19] , Advanced Materials 29, 1602971 (2017) [20] ).
Elucidated benefit of nanogap cavities for point-of-care immunoassays. Integrated a sandwich immunoassay microarray within a plasmonic nanogap cavity resulting in a 151-fold increase in fluorescence and 14-fold improvement in the limit-of-detection for the cardiac biomarker B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP). (Nano Letters 20, 4330 (2020) [21] , Advanced Materials 35, 2107986 (2023) [22] ).
Showed first, ultrabright single photon source at 1550 nm. Sandwiched colloidal quantum dots in a nanogap cavity to enhance their spontaneous emission rate ~10,000-times. This resulted in single photon emission count rates of 12.6 MHz for quantum dots emitting at 1550 nm and 15 MHz for quantum dots emitting at 1350 nm, corresponding to an improvement of more than two orders of magnitude over state-of-the-art. (Under review, (2024) [4] ).
Her most cited publications are:
Harry Albert Atwater, Jr. is an American physicist and materials scientist and is the Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the division of engineering and applied science at the California Institute of Technology. Currently he is the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science and the director for the Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA), a Department of Energy Hub program for solar fuels. Atwater's scientific effort focuses on nanophotonic light-matter interactions and solar energy conversion. His current research in energy centers on high efficiency photovoltaics, carbon capture and removal, and photoelectrochemical processes for generation of solar fuels. His research has resulted in world records for solar photovoltaic conversion and photoelectrochemical water splitting. His work also spans fundamental nanophotonic phenomena, in plasmonics and 2D materials, and also applications including active metasurfaces and optical propulsion.
Vladimir (Vlad) M. Shalaev is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Scientific Director for Nanophotonics at Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University.
A spaser or plasmonic laser is a type of laser which aims to confine light at a subwavelength scale far below Rayleigh's diffraction limit of light, by storing some of the light energy in electron oscillations called surface plasmon polaritons. The phenomenon was first described by David J. Bergman and Mark Stockman in 2003. The word spaser is an acronym for "surface plasmon amplification by stimulated emission of radiation". The first such devices were announced in 2009 by three groups: a 44-nanometer-diameter nanoparticle with a gold core surrounded by a dyed silica gain medium created by researchers from Purdue, Norfolk State and Cornell universities, a nanowire on a silver screen by a Berkeley group, and a semiconductor layer of 90 nm surrounded by silver pumped electrically by groups at the Eindhoven University of Technology and at Arizona State University. While the Purdue-Norfolk State-Cornell team demonstrated the confined plasmonic mode, the Berkeley team and the Eindhoven-Arizona State team demonstrated lasing in the so-called plasmonic gap mode. In 2018, a team from Northwestern University demonstrated a tunable nanolaser that can preserve its high mode quality by exploiting hybrid quadrupole plasmons as an optical feedback mechanism.
A nanolaser is a laser that has nanoscale dimensions and it refers to a micro-/nano- device which can emit light with light or electric excitation of nanowires or other nanomaterials that serve as resonators. A standard feature of nanolasers includes their light confinement on a scale approaching or suppressing the diffraction limit of light. These tiny lasers can be modulated quickly and, combined with their small footprint, this makes them ideal candidates for on-chip optical computing.
A coherent perfect absorber (CPA), or anti-laser, is a device which absorbs coherent waves, such as coherent light waves, and converts them into some form of internal energy, e.g. heat or electrical energy. It is the time-reversed counterpart of a laser. Coherent perfect absorption allows control of waves with waves without a nonlinear medium. The concept was first published in the July 26, 2010, issue of Physical Review Letters, by a team at Yale University led by theorist A. Douglas Stone and experimental physicist Hui W. Cao. In the September 9, 2010, issue of Physical Review A, Stefano Longhi of Polytechnic University of Milan showed how to combine a laser and an anti-laser in a single device. In February 2011 the team at Yale built the first working anti-laser. It is a two-channel CPA device which absorbs two beams from the same laser, but only when the beams have the correct phases and amplitudes. The initial device absorbed 99.4 percent of all incoming light, but the team behind the invention believe it will be possible to achieve 99.999 percent. Originally implemented as a Fabry-Pérot cavity that is many wavelengths thick, the optical CPA operates at specific optical frequencies. In January 2012, thin-film CPA has been proposed by utilizing the achromatic dispersion of metal-like materials, exhibiting the unparalleled bandwidth and thin profile advantages. Shortly after, CPA was observed in various thin film materials, including photonic metamaterial, multi-layer graphene, single and multiple layers of chromium, as well as microwave metamaterial.
The Purcell effect is the enhancement of a quantum system's spontaneous emission rate by its environment. In the 1940s Edward Mills Purcell discovered the enhancement of spontaneous emission rates of atoms when they are incorporated into a resonant cavity. In terms of quantum electrodynamics the Purcell effect is a consequence of enhancement of local density of photonic states at the emitter position. It can also be considered as an interference effect. The oscillator radiates the wave which is reflected from the environment. In turn the reflection excites the oscillator either out of phase resulting in higher damping rate accompanied with the radiation enhancement or in phase with the oscillator mode leading to the radiation suppression.
A plasmonic metamaterial is a metamaterial that uses surface plasmons to achieve optical properties not seen in nature. Plasmons are produced from the interaction of light with metal-dielectric materials. Under specific conditions, the incident light couples with the surface plasmons to create self-sustaining, propagating electromagnetic waves known as surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). Once launched, the SPPs ripple along the metal-dielectric interface. Compared with the incident light, the SPPs can be much shorter in wavelength.
Andrea Alù is an Italian American scientist and engineer, currently Einstein Professor of Physics at The City University of New York Graduate Center. He is known for his contributions to the fields of optics, photonics, plasmonics, and acoustics, most notably in the context of metamaterials and metasurfaces. He has co-authored over 650 journal papers and 35 book chapters, and he holds 11 U.S. patents.
Photonic molecules are a form of matter in which photons bind together to form "molecules". They were first predicted in 2007. Photonic molecules are formed when individual (massless) photons "interact with each other so strongly that they act as though they have mass". In an alternative definition, photons confined to two or more coupled optical cavities also reproduce the physics of interacting atomic energy levels, and have been termed as photonic molecules.
Ortwin Hess is a German-born theoretical physicist at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and Imperial College London (UK), working in condensed matter optics. Bridging condensed matter theory and quantum optics he specialises in quantum nanophotonics, plasmonics, metamaterials and semiconductor laser dynamics. Since the late 1980s he has been an author and coauthor of over 300 peer-reviewed articles, the most popular of which, called "'Trapped rainbow' storage of light in metamaterials", was cited more than 400 times. He pioneered active nanoplasmonics and metamaterials with quantum gain and in 2014 he introduced the "stopped-light lasing" principle as a novel route to cavity-free (nano-) lasing and localisation of amplified surface plasmon polaritons, giving him an h-index of 33.
Plasmonics or nanoplasmonics refers to the generation, detection, and manipulation of signals at optical frequencies along metal-dielectric interfaces in the nanometer scale. Inspired by photonics, plasmonics follows the trend of miniaturizing optical devices, and finds applications in sensing, microscopy, optical communications, and bio-photonics.
Graphene is a 2D nanosheet with atomic thin thickness in terms of 0.34 nm. Due to the ultrathin thickness, graphene showed many properties that are quite different from their bulk graphite counterparts. The most prominent advantages are known to be their high electron mobility and high mechanical strengths. Thus, it exhibits potential for applications in optics and electronics especially for the development of wearable devices as flexible substrates. More importantly, the optical absorption rate of graphene is 2.3% in the visible and near-infrared region. This broadband absorption characteristic also attracted great attention of the research community to exploit the graphene-based photodetectors/modulators.
Hrvoje Petek is a Croatian-born American physicist and the Richard King Mellon Professor of Physics and Astronomy, at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is also a professor of chemistry.
The International Conference on Surface Plasmon Photonics (SPP) is a biennial conference series in the field of plasmonics, including electron-plasmon interactions; energy harvesting; graphene, mid-IR, and THz plasmonics; near-field instrumentation; novel plasmonic materials; particle manipulations; plasmonic, metasurface, and metamaterial devices; sensors and transducers for biomedical applications; ultrafast and nonlinear phenomena; and quantum plasmonics.
Ultrafast scanning electron microscopy (UFSEM) combines two microscopic modalities, Pump-probe microscopy and Scanning electron microscope, to gather temporal and spatial resolution phenomena. The technique uses ultrashort laser pulses for pump excitation of the material and the sample response will be detected by an Everhart-Thornley detector. Acquiring data depends mainly on formation of images by raster scan mode after pumping with short laser pulse at different delay times. The characterization of the output image will be done through the temporal resolution aspect. Thus, the idea is to exploit the shorter DeBroglie wavelength in respect to the photons which has great impact to increase the resolution about 1 nm. That technique is an up-to-date approach to study the dynamic of charge on material surfaces.
Prineha Narang is an American physicist and computational material scientist. She is a Professor of Physical Sciences and Howard Reiss Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Narang currently serves as a U.S. Science Envoy approved by the Secretary of State to identify opportunities for science and technology cooperation. Before moving to UCLA, she was first an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University Center for the Environment and then an Assistant Professor in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Narang’s work has been recognized internationally by many awards and a variety of special designations, including the Mildred Dresselhaus Prize, the 2021 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics, a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and a Max Planck Sabbatical Award from the Max Planck Society. Narang also received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2020, was named a Moore Inventor Fellow by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for the development for a fundamentally new strategy for single molecule sensing and environmental toxin metrology using picoscale quantum sensors, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a Top Innovator by MIT Tech Review. Narang was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.
Mark Stockman was a Soviet-born American physicist. He was a professor of physics and astronomy at Georgia State University. Best known for his contributions to plasmonics, Stockman has co-theorized plasmonic lasers, also known as spasers, in 2003.
Photon-Induced Near-field Electron Microscopy (PINEM) is a variant of the Ultrafast Transmission Electron Microscopy technique and is based on the inelastic coupling between electrons and photons in presence of a surface or a nanostructure. This method allows one to investigate time-varying nanoscale electromagnetic fields in an electron microscope.
Isabelle Philippa Staude is a German photonics researcher and Professor at the Friedrich Schiller Universitaet, Jena. Her research involves the creation of plasmonic nanostructures and metamaterials for the dynamic manipulation of light.
Jaime Gómez Rivas is a Spanish physicist and an academic. He is a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology.
