Jeremy Baumberg - Pico-Photonics: Watching and sensing single molecules by confining light to the atom scale

In this plenary session, Jeremy J. Baumberg of University of Cambridge (UK) notes how coupling between plasmonic metal nano-components generates strongly red-shifted resonances combined with intense local field amplification on the nanoscale. This allows us to watch in real time individual molecules and atoms or excitons in semiconductors.

Baumberg's team has recently explored plasmonic coupling which can be tuned dynamically, through reliable bottom-up self-assembly using a nanoparticle-on-mirror geometry (NPoM). Now they show that it is possible to confine light to below 1nm3, allowing researchers to see single atoms move dynamically, and examine single bonds within a molecule.

Baumberg shows how molecular optomechanics works, and how it provides the ability to track and watch molecules interact and react. This opens up the ability to study chemistry molecule-by-molecule and potentially to control single reaction pathways.

Jeremy J. Baumberg FRS, directs a UK Nano-Photonics Centre at the University of Cambridge and has extensive experience in developing optical materials structured on the nano-scale that can be assembled in large volume. He is also Director of the Cambridge Nano Doctoral Training Centre, a key UK site for training PhD students in interdisciplinary Nano research.

His experience with Hitachi, IBM, and his own spin-offs help him combine academic insight with industry application. With over 20,000 citations, he is a leading innovator in Nano. This has led to awards of the IoP Faraday gold Medal (2017), Royal Society Rumford Medal (2014), IoP Young Medal (2013), Royal Society Mullard Prize (2005), the IoP Charles Vernon Boys Medal (2000) and the IoP Mott Lectureship (2005). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Optical Society of America, the Institute of Physics, and the Institute of NanoTechnology. 

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