Summary
Thanks to the light-induced collective oscillations of free charges at the boundary between a conducting material and a dielectric, known as surface plasmon resonance, metallic nanostructures can exhibit strong light absorption and scattering. The sensitivity of these resonances to the local environment and shape of the metallic structures allows them to be used, for example, in chemical sensing and cancer therapy. Semiconductor and metal-oxide nanoparticles expand possible wavelengths of surface plasmon resonances into the infrared spectrum and can possibly allow for coupling of the surface plasmon resonances of the nanoparticle, which are of classical nature, to the particle’s semiconductor band structure, which arises from quantum states of the charge carriers. These charge carriers are the electron-hole pairs known as excitons in the semiconductor.
We have recently developed a new method to produce doped transparent-metal-oxide plasmonic nanocrystals and used these to demonstrate for the first time a plasmon-exciton coupling in any plasmonic semiconductor system. Our goal in this project is to further explore the plasmon-exciton coupling in semiconductor and metal-oxide nanostructures and to develop methods to use this coupling for plasmon control of the quantum states of single defects and for their entanglement. We expect this will open the door for these systems to be deployed in quantum sensing and computing applications. In particular, we believe our studies will lead to the design of inexpensive and highly sensitive magneto-optical sensors for thermal imaging and molecular sensing.
Related Content

Photonic Quantum Processor
Photonic quantum processors based on integrated quantum photonic circuits require entangled photon pairs to perform quantum computations. However, current state-of-the-art technologies utilize probabilistic entangled photon sources with limited pair-extraction efficiencies, negatively affecting the computation speed. This project aims to boost the speed of on-chip quantum operations by using bright, on-demand entangled photon sources with an […]
April 24, 2023

Repurposing potential drug candidates for the treatment of COVID-19
Summary The main protease (Mpro) in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus responsible for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), has emerged as a promising drug target. The scientific community has produced a large number of crystallographic structures of the protease, which mediates viral replication and transcription. These structures report several fragments with varied chemotypes […]
May 6, 2020
Line-Scanning optical coherence tomography system for in-vivo, non-invasive imaging of the cellular structure and blood perfusion of biological tissue
Summary Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an optical imaging method that allows for in-vivo, non-invasive imaging of the structure and vasculature of biological tissue. Commercially available, clinical OCT systems utilize point-scanning method to acquire volumetric images over a large surface with typical frame rates of ~ 30 frames/ second. Since living biological tissue is constantly […]
August 27, 2019

Composite Superconductors for Improved Quantum Coherence
Summary Conventional superconductors have trouble performing well in magnetic fields required for electron spin resonance (ESR) – based quantum information processing applications. We can, however, use proximity engineering to select desired properties from different materials and combine them for improved superconducting performance in magnetic fields — an improvement that would have strong implications for […]
December 12, 2018