Nanophotonics for manipulation of light propagation, excitation dynamics, and multiphoton in-situ conversion: their applications (Conference Presentation)

Abstract

This talk is dedicated to the memory of Professor Joe Haus who was a world leader in Nanophotonics. It presents some of our collaborative work in Nanophotonics and highlights some of the exciting new directions presented at 11 of the “International conference on Nanophotonics “series, founded and chaired by Joe . We collaborated on nonlinear optics, stimulated Mie scattering and light manipulation in photonic structures and nanocomposites. Our work on chirality control in composites plasmonic nanostructures and nonlinearity in a medium with epsilon near zero will be covered. Another concept we explored is interaction of structured light carrying both spin angular momentum and orbital angular momentum, with a chiral medium coupling electric and magnetic dipoles, to induce a giant and wavelength tunable chiro-optic response. We developed rare-earth doped fluoride nanocrystals act as optical nanotransformers for in-situ conversion of light from one spectral range to another by multiphoton processes through real intermediate states. The physics of manipulating excitation dynamics in these optical nanotransformers in core-multiple shell nanostructures will be discussed. We recently introduced new energy transfer routes for broadband light harvesting and increased efficiency of both multiphoton upconversion (IR to Visible) and down conversion (Quantum cutting from UV or Visible to Visible or IR) via multistep-cascaded energy transfer in a core-multishell nanoarchitecture. The applications explored of this photon conversion include IR harvesting of photons for photovoltaics, high contrast bioimaging, light activated drug release and optogenetics for neuronal stimulation. Future perspectives will be presented