Surface plasmons (SP) are electromagnetic (EM) modes strongly coupled to collective oscillations of free-electrons at the interface of conductive materials. They enable the confinement of EM fields into subwavelength volumes with strong local field enhancement. These properties can be exploited to increase light-matter interactions at the subwavelength scale, leading to a wide range of intriguing applications such as active plasmonic devices, biosensing, and surface-enhanced spectroscopy. Over the last thirty years, there has been intense interest to enhance the electric field on surfaces with plasmonics ideas. The electric field close to a sharp corner can be strongly enhanced, as for example, with nanoparticles and with bow-tie structures, but these are over a small area. For practical applications, it is important that the average field intensity averaged over the whole surface be enhanced. In this talk, the speaker will discuss an explicit example of how this average can be increased by orders of magnitude with surface resonances of large wave vectors, which is useful for a wide range of applications.
About the speaker
Prof Siu-Tat Chui received his BS degree in Physics from McGill University in 1969 and his PhD degree in Physics from Princeton University in 1972. He was an Assistant Professor at the University at SUNY-Albany from 1975 to 1979 and joined the Bartol Research Foundation in 1979. He is currently a Professor in the Bartol Research Institute of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Delaware. In 2015, he is appointed as Visiting Fellow of HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study. His main research interests are in theoretical condensed matter physics. His work includes droplets of quantum fluids, metamaterials, micromagnetics of small structures, spin-polarized transport, and physics of power electronics.
The seminar is free and open to all. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.
