DLS Isabelle Staude: Tailoring light fields with active semiconductor metasurfaces

Biography:

Prof. Dr. Isabelle Staude studied physics at the University of Konstanz, and subsequently received her Ph.D. degree from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, in 2011. For her postdoc, she moved to the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She returned to Germany in mid-2015 to establish a junior research group on functional photonic nanostructures at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. In fall 2017, she became a junior professor at the same institution. She was promoted to full professor in spring 2020. She received an Emmy-Noether Grant from the German research Foundation as well as the Hertha Sponer Prize 2017 from the German Physical Society. Isabelle Staude is an alumna of the German Young Academy (Junge Akademie) and a Fellow of the Max Planck School of Photonics.

Abstract:

Metasurfaces composed of designed semiconductor nanoresonators arranged in a plane offer unique opportunities for controlling the properties of light fields. Such metasurfaces can e.g. impose a spatially variant phase shift onto an incident light field, thereby providing control over its wave front with high transmittance efficiency. However, most semiconductor metasurfaces realized so far were passive and linear, and their optical response was permanently encoded into the structure during fabrication. Recently, a growing amount of research is concentrating on active metasurfaces, specifically on the integration of emitters and optical nonlinearities into dielectric and semiconductor metasurfaces, and on obtaining dynamic control of their optical response. This talk will provide an overview of our recent advances in nonlinear, tunable and light-emitting all-dielectric metasurfaces. In particular, we have studied spontaneous emission from metasurfaces incorporating various types of emitters, as well as second harmonic generation and spontaneous parametric downconversion in metasurfaces made of, or containing, materials with a high second-order nonlinear susceptibility. Our results show that both the directional, spectral and/or polarization properties of the spontaneously emitted or nonlinearly generated light can be tailored by the metasurface design. For dynamic tuning of the metasurface response, we make use of the strong spectral dispersion associated with the resonant optical response of the metasurfaces in combination with the sensitivity of the resonance properties on the refractive index of the dielectric environment or constituent material of the individual nanoresonators. Specifically, by integrating the semiconductor metasurfaces into nematic-liquid-crystal cells or responsive polymers, we can dynamically tune their linear-optical response in the near-infrared spectral range using various stimuli as control parameters.


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