Optical metasurfaces have been established as a versatile platform for manipulating light fields at the nanoscale. While initial research efforts were concentrated on purely passive structures, metasurfaces also hold a huge potential for dynamic control of light fields, as well as for tailoring light emission processes, such as spontaneous emission and nonlinear frequency generation. Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (ML-TMDCs), due to their unique optical, electronic and optoelectronic properties as well as their flat nature, are a highly attractive material choice for integrating such active functionalities into the metasurface architecture.
This talk reviews our recent and ongoing activities in hybridizing optical metasurfaces composed of resonant metallic or dielectric building blocks with ML-TMDCs. We demonstrate that the ability of the nanoresonators to concentrate light into nanoscale volumes can be utilized to carefully control the properties, such as pattern and polarization, of light emitted by 2D-TMDCs via photoluminescence or nonlinear optical processes. Furthermore, we investigate the ability of tailored nanostructures to interact selectively with exciton populations located at inequivalent conduction band minima at the corners of the ML-TMDC’s Brillouin zone.
Finally, we suggest that resonant nanoantennas can be used to probe the nature of chiral emission from ML-TMDCs. Altogether, our results contribute to a better fundamental understanding of coupling of photonic nanostructures to excitons in ML-TMDCs and are an important step towards the realization of future miniaturized active metasurface and valleytronic devices
About the presenter
Prof. Isabelle Staude studied physics at the University of Konstanz and subsequently received her PhD degree in physics from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, in 2011. For her postdoc, she moved to the Australian National University, where she coordinated the experimental activities on optical nanoantennas and served the nanoplasmonics stream in the Australian Centre of Excellence CUDOS as deputy project leader. She returned to Germany in mid-2015 to establish a junior research group on functional photonic nanostructures at the Institute of Applied Physics and the Abbe Center of Photonics at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. She received an Emmy-Noether Grant from the German Research Foundation as well as the Hertha Sponer Prize 2017 from the German Physical Society. In November 2017, she became a junior professor at the same institution. From autumn 2016 to spring 2020 she coordinated the research association “Nano-Film” funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). Since 2018, she serves as Associate Editor for Optics Express. She is an elected member of the Faculty Council of the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, a member of the German Young Academy, and a member of the Management Board of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) “Nonlinear Optics Down to Atomic Scales” (NOA). In spring 2020, she was promoted to full professor and joined the Institute for Solid State Physics at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.