In the past 30 months, the team has managed to achieve most of the proposed objectives for this first part of the project, and we have started already the second phase of the MIRAGE 20-15 project.
The first 10 months period was devoted to renovate the class 100,000 optical laboratory and to equip it with state-of-the-art equipment namely a Ti:Sapphire sub 10 fs ultrashort laser system (Venteon OPCPA), a scattering SNOM system with broadband capabilities at the mid-IR and near-IR (NeaSpec SNOM), Spatial light modulators and more.
During that time, the team that is working on this project has been hired.
During the past 20 months, the team has managed to integrate a scattering near field capability with broadband detection at the mid and near-IR and also developed an adiabatic frequency conversion setup that readily delivers few microjoule energy level mid-IR pulses. In that period we have exploited the experimental apparatus and performed experiments with near-field broadband spectroscopy based on Fourier-Transform Infrared (FTIR) and studied the broadband spectral response of plasmonic nanosctructures. Also, we have already combined the achieved near field capability with our near-IR sub 10fs source and a home built pump-probe apparatus, With this unique system, we have, to the best of our knowledge for the first time, measured spatio-temporally the exciton-polaritons excitation and propagation in WSe2 flakes. Currently we are writing two manuscripts that sum-up these experimental achievements. Furthermore, during the work toward the main goals of MIRAGE 20-15, we have been exploring two related research directions – one that is related to enhancing near-field resolution in microscopy and the other was extending our capability of adiabatic frequency conversion to include also nonlinear time-dependent pulses, which open possibilities such as Second Harmonic generation and depleted Sum- and Difference frequency generation (SFG and DFG).
