SONAR aims to give a clear picture of the interaction between infrared plasmonic nanomaterials and two-dimensional materials as graphene or transition metal dichalcogenides.
Within SONAR the objectives are:
- to explore fundamentals in doped semiconductor nanocrystals (dSNCs) including various different materials, sizes, shapes, their doping mechanism, their general dielectric properties, the case of ultralow doping, and interactions between the LSPR and the interband transition;
- to exploit hybrid interactions of dSNCs to investigate exciton-plasmon, plasmon-plasmon coupling or plasmon induced ‘hot’ electron transfer and explore dSNCs for the manipulation of layered two dimensional materials;
- to exploit the characteristics of dSNCs for optical devices such as electrochromics, electro-tunable light emitters, or tunable NIR photodetectors.
We have published a broad review in Physics Reports entitled “Plasmonic doped semiconductor nanocrystals: Properties, fabrication, applications and perspectives” that aims to make a library of all the recently reported plasmonic doped semiconductor nanocrystals. We have also demonstrated the ultrafast switching of a doped metal oxide based photonic structure. Moreover, we reported several studies that answer important questions on the exciton and charge dynamics of two-dimensional materials.
The achievements in SONAR are important for the society since these findings are necessary for the engineering of electrochromic windows, novel light emitters and near infrared detector.