Advanced Photonics

I report on lotest results that make use of plasmonic mode coupling and modification of the local density of stetes in plasmonic nanostructures. The first experiment realizes a plasmonic Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model in which collective but localized edge modes appear in the middle of a band gap. We visualize the subwavelength structure of these modes by photo-electron emission microscopy. The second experiment reports on organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) that have subwavelength dimensions while still possessing individual electrical connections. Screens with such small pixels may be needed in miniaturized projectors for augmented/virtual reality applicafions. We will discuss how the scaling of convenfional OLEDs breaks down upon miniaturizafion and why new, plasmonic nanoantenna-based concepts are expected to play an important role in subwavelength OLED pixels. 

Prof. Dr. Bert Hecht is an expert in plasmonics and nano-optics. He received his PhD in 1996 from the University of Basel, Switzerland in collaboration with IBM Rüschlikon Research Lab, where he worked under supervision of Dieter Pohl on near-field optical microscopy. He then spent a postdoc at ETH Zurich with Urs Wild working on microscopy and spectroscopy of single molecules. After that he was awarded a research professorship of the Swiss national science foundation, which he spent at the University of Basel. In 2006 he joined the University of Würzburg, Germany, first as associate and later as full professor of experimental physics. The Hecht group is currently investigating the physics and applications of strong coupling of plasmonic nanoresonators to single emitters at ambient conditions, electrically-driven and -actuated nano-optical hybrid systems, light-driven microdrones, and many more exciting topics.