The first ever photograph of light as both a particle and wave
© 2015 EPFL
We are very pleased to announce and cordially invite you to our monthly EPFL Photonics Chapter (EPC) 'Pizza-optics-beer' (POB) seminar on May 6th, 2015 (Wednesday) at 17h15 (5.15pm). The seminar will take place in the room CM1100. This month Tom T.A. Lummen will give us some insights in his field of expertise. His presentation is entitled: “Simultaneous Experimental Observation of the Quantization and the Interference Pattern of a Plasmonic Near-Field”.
His research was recently highlighted on EPFL website: The first ever photograph of light as both a particle and wave. <- Check out the nice video!
If you are not already convinced to join us, please read the abstract of the presentation.
Abstract:
Miniaturized plasmonic and photonic integrated circuits are generally considered as the core of future generations of optoelectronic devices, due to their potential to bridge the size-compatibility gap between photonics and electronics. However, as the nanoscale is approached in increasingly small plasmonic and photonic systems, the need to experimentally observe and characterize their behavior in detail faces increasingly stringent requirements in terms of spatial and temporal resolution, field of view, and acquisition time. In this talk, I will focus on a specific electron microscopy technique performed in our lab at EPFL, Photon-Induced Near-Field Electron Microscopy (PINEM), which is capable of imaging optical evanescent fields and surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in nanoplasmonic structures with both nanometer and femtosecond resolution. I will outline the general working principle of the system, which uses advanced electron energy filter is to analyze the quantized energy exchange between a photo-induced SPP and an ultra-short bunch of probing electrons. In electron energy loss/gain spectroscopy mode, the exchange of up to 30 photon quanta with the photo-induced SPPs in silver nanoantennae is observed. In PINEM imaging mode, the spatial properties of the photo-induced standing SPP wave on a single silver nanoresonator, as well as in extended plasmonic structures, are shown to be controlled by the polarization of the optical pump pulse. These results are guided and corroborated by extensive 3D finite-element modeling. Finally, I will explain our most recent experiment, which involves a novel hybrid acquisition mode; one which synchronously characterizes the electron-SPP interaction along both a spatial coordinate and energy. This allowed us to capture both the characteristic spatial interference and the energy quantization of the SPP in the same experiment, providing a unique visualization of the wave-particle duality of its electromagnetic near-field.