[Seminer] Plasmons in Metallic Nanostructures: Excitation, Propagation and Detection by Prof. Paul Leiderer

Abstract:

Plasmons are excitations of electronic systems which bear huge potential for many applications in optoelectronic devices, material processing on the nanoscale, sensing etc. For the development of devices, imaging the plasmon modes is an important aspect. In this talk several methods for imaging will be presented, on the one hand for localized modes in gold nano-particles (e.g. by local ablation of a substrate, local melting of the structures, and two-photon photopolymerization), on the other hand for propagating plasmons in thin mesoscopic gold stripes (e.g. by plasmon-phonon or plasmon-photon conversion). Comparisons with FTDT (Finite Difference in the Time Domain) simulations show that such calculations are a valuable and powerful tool, yet with some shortcomings.

Bio:

Paul Leiderer studied Physics at the Technical University of Munich (Germany) and in his PhD work investigated the propagation of hypersound in the quantum crystal ⁴He. After a stay as a postdoc at Cornell University he spent one year in industry and then joined the Physics Department of the Technical University of Munich as an Assistant Professor. In 1982 he became Professor at the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, and since 1988 he is Professor in Experimental Physics at the University of Konstanz. He was one of the founders of the Collaborative Research Centre “Nanostructures at Surfaces and Interfaces” of the German Science Foundation in 1996, and was the chairperson of this centre for 12 years. His research interests are in the field of Surface and Low Temperature Physics, in particular nanostructures, interaction of laser light with surfaces and surface structures, interfaces of condensed quantum matter, two-dimensional electron systems, and colloidal ensembles as model systems for condensed matter.