Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MaP (Material properties in the strong light-matter coupling regime)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2021-04-01 al 2023-03-31
Light can be confined into a small space by using two mirrors facing each other. Our daily experience would suggest that we can freely choose how much light should bounce back and forth between the mirrors. Especially, we may also choose to have no light at all. The theory of Quantum electrodynamics however tells us, that a minimum amount of light energy (zero-point energy) must always remain in between the mirrors. In recent years, it has become clear, that this zero-point energy can change numerous properties of materials that are placed in between those mirrors – without requiring any energy input. This thus unlocks an entirely new toolbox to engineer electrical and chemical material properties. In this project, we focus on engineering electrical properties of materials, in order to obtain new electrical devices (transistors) that possess functionalities that cannot be achieved by other means.
During this first part of the project, a new type of device has been designed and processed that allows to perform electrical transport measurements through a material that is simulatanously ultrastrongly coupled to a plasmonic metasurface. The metasurface is also known as a Pancharatnam-Berry phase metasurface, which means that the corrugations on the surface are rotated along one direction, introducing a local rotation of the coordinate system. During the experiments, we have noticed, that the behaviour of the metasurface is far more complex and interesting than previously discussed by others researchers in the field. We hence saw the need to investigate the metasurface more closely. To this end, we built a new optical setup needed to adequatly characterize the unusualy complex optical spin-orbit interactions of light with the metasurface. The results are in the process of being written into a paper form and will be published in a peer-reviewed journal in the coming months.
The results beyond the state of the art will be published in the coming months in a peer reviewed journal.