Harry A. Atwater plenary presentation: Tunable and Quantum Metaphotonics

Progress in understanding resonant subwavelength structures has fueled an explosion of interest in fundamental processes and nanophotonic devices. The carrier density and optical properties of photonic nanostructures are typically fixed at the time of fabrication, but field effect tuning of the potential and carrier density enables the photonic dispersion to be altered, yielding new approaches to energy conversion and tunable radiative emission. Electrochemical in metals yields tunable resonances and reveals the plasmoelectric effect, a newly-discovered photoelectrochemical potential. Finally, while plasmons are usually described in a classical electromagnetic theory context, under single photon excitation quantum coherent states emerge.

In this plenary session, entanglement or coherent superposition states of single plasmons using two plasmon-quantum interference in chip-based plasmon waveguide directional couplers is demonstrated.

Harry Atwater is the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology. Professor Atwater currently serves as Director of the DOE Energy Frontier Research Center on Light-Matter Interactions in Solar Energy Conversion, and is also Director of the Resnick Institute for Science, Energy and Sustainability. His scientific interests have two themes: plasmonics and optical metamaterials as well as photovoltaics and solar energy conversion. Atwater is an early pioneer in nanophotonics and plasmonics; he gave the name to the field of plasmonics in 2001.