Nicholas V. Proscia

Control of photo-induced voltages in plasmonic crystals via spin-orbit interactions

There is wide interest in understanding and leveraging the nonlinear plasmon-induced potentials of nanostructured materials. We investigate the electrical response produced by spin-polarized light across a large-area bottom-up assembled 2D plasmonic crystal. Numerical approximations of the Lorentz forces provide quantitative agreement with our experimentally-measured DC voltages. We show that the underlying mechanism of the spin-polarized voltages is a gradient force that arises from asymmetric, time-averaged hotspots, whose locations shift with the chirality of light. Finally, we formalize the role of spin-orbit interactions in the shifted intensity patterns and significantly advance our understanding of the physical phenomena, often related to the spin Hall effect of light.

Meta-Optical Chirality and Emergent Eigen-polarization Modes via Plasmon Interactions

The response of an individual meta-atom is often generalized to explain the collective response of a metasurface in a manner that neglects the interactions between meta-atoms. Here, we study a metasurface composed of tilted achiral meta-atoms with no spatial variation of the unit cell that derives appreciable optical chirality solely from the asymmetric interactions between meta-atoms. The interactions between meta-atoms are considered to stem from the Lorentz force arising from the Larmor radiation of adjacent plasmonic resonators because their inclusion in a simple model accurately predicts the bonding/anti- bonding modes that are measured experimentally. We also experimentally observe the emergence of multiple polarization eigenmodes, among other polarization-dependent responses, which cannot be modeled with the conventional formalism of transmission matrices. Our results are vital to the precise characterization and design of metasurfaces.

Controlling Spatial Coherence in Multimode Fibers

We demonstrate that the randomized output field of multimode fibers can be focused in the near field or collimated in the far field by wavefront shaping in the input or the output fields

Control of Light-matter Interaction Using Photonic Hypercrystals

We demonstrate broadband enhancement of light emission from quantum dots, single photon emitters and 2D semiconductors using photonic hypercrystals (PHC). Both out-coupling and spontaneous emission rate are increased from the different emitters.

Enhanced transverse photo-induced voltage by slow light

We demonstrate the presence of spin-polarized transverse voltage in a metal-dielectric two-dimensional photonic crystal in the visible regime and determine that the presence of slow light at the photonic band edge leads to voltage enhancement.