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

Cryo-CMOS to Control and Operate 2D Fault-Tolerant Qubit Network
Summary Large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computation requires precise and stable control of individual qubits. This project will use complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology to provide a cost-effective scalable platform for reliable and high-density control infrastructure for silicon spin qubits. We will use sub-micron CMOS technology to address device and circuit-level challenges and explore the integration of […]
June 14, 2018

Distributing Multimode Entanglement with Microwave Photons
Microwaves have enabled numerous classical technologies, in part because they propagate through air with little energy loss.
March 6, 2017

Scanning Tunneling Microscopy of Quantum Materials, Devices and Molecules
Summary This project advances our ability to characterize and study novel quantum materials, quantum devices, and even individual molecules at the atomic level. By combining Non-Contact Atomic Force Microscopy (NC-AFM), Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) and scanning gate methods, we correlate spatial information with transport properties and can locally manipulate charge, spin and structural states. […]
January 28, 2019

Hybrid Quantum Materials towards Topological Quantum Computing
Summary Proximity engineered hybrid materials have shown promise for topological quantum information processing. This form of quantum computing provides a stable, error-tolerant approach for building scalable quantum information processors. Topological quantum computing relies on braiding non-Abelian particles, such as Majorana fermions, which do not exist in nature. One can however use materials engineering to […]
December 8, 2018