Yuika Saito

Direct and Indirect Interlayer Excitons in a van der Waals Heterostructure of hBN/WS2/MoS2/hBN

A van der Waals (vdW) heterostructure composed of multivalley systems can show excitonic optical responses from interlayer excitons that originate from several valleys in the electronic structure. In this work, we studied photoluminescence (PL) from a vdW heterostructure, WS2/MoS2, deposited on hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) flakes. PL spectra from the fabricated heterostructures observed at room temperature show PL peaks at 1.3-1.7 eV, which are absent in the PL spectra of WS2 or MoS2 monolayers alone. The low-energy PL peaks we observed can be decomposed into three distinct peaks. Through detailed PL measurements and theoretical analysis, including PL imaging, time-resolved PL measurements, and calculation of dielectric function ε(ω) by solving the Bethe-Salpeter equation with G0 W0, we concluded that the three PL peaks originate from direct K-K interlayer excitons, indirect Q-Γ interlayer excitons, and indirect K-Γ interlayer excitons.

Metallic tips for efficient plasmon nanofocusing and advanced optical nano-imaging

Plasmon nanofocusing, a phenomenon where plasmons propagate on a tapered metallic structure with compressing its energy into a nanometric volume of the apex to generate localized electric field, holds a great promise for near-field optical imaging techniques due to its background-free nature. Because it does not require to illuminate the tip apex with an incident laser, one can efficiently eliminate scattering background noise by the incident laser, which has been an issue in conventional near-field optical microscopies. To apply plasmon nanofocusing for near-field optical imaging, a tapered metallic tip plays an important role as a base material for plasmon propagation. It is therefore essential to establish an efficient and practical methods of the metallic tip fabrication for plasmon-nanofocusing-based optical imaging techniques. In this study, we propose an optimized tip fabrication for efficient plasmon nanofocusing, which achieved 100% reproducibility in plasmon nanofocusing. Through numerical analysis, we have optimized the tip structure, such as types of material, metal thickness, plasmon coupler structure, etc. Also, the fabrication conditions were well-optimized to obtain smooth metal surface down to 0.5 nm roughness to reduce energy loss of plasmon propagation. Through thorough optimizations, we observed plasmon nanofocusing with 100% reproducibility in more than 20 fabricated metallic tips. Such efficient, reliable and practical tip fabrication opens the doors for many potential scientists working in related fields.

Raman imaging of lipid bilayer membrane by surface enhanced Raman scattering

We investigated two-dimensional lipid bilayers by spectroscopic imaging with surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). A DSPC lipid bilayer incubated on a glass substrate was coated with a thin layer of silver. Due to the strong electromagnetic enhancement of the silver film and the affinity to lipid molecules, the Raman spectrum of a single bilayer was obtained in a 1 s exposure time with 0.1 mW of incident laser power. In the C-H vibrational region of the spectra, which is sensitive to bilayer configurations, a randomly stacked area was dominated by the CH3 asymmetric-stretch mode, whereas flat areas including double bilayers showed typical SERS spectra. The spectral features of the randomly stacked area are explained by the existence of many free lipid molecules, which is supported by DFT calculations of paired DSPC molecules. Our method can be applied to reveal the local crystallinity of single lipid bilayers, which is difficult to assess by conventional Raman imaging.

Near-field visible light absorption imaging by Raman-nano-light source

We propose a new nano-imaging technique for intrinsic absorption properties of materials under a platform of conventional aperture-less near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM). In aperture-less NSOM, when a silicon nanotip is utilized and illuminated by the visible light instead of a metallic tip, Raman scattering of silicon from the tip apex can be obtained. Since the wavelength of this Raman scattered light is shifted to 520cm-1 from the one of the excitation light, far-field background signal excited by the diffraction limited focus spot of the incident light, which is one of the major problems in aperture-less NSOM, can be avoided. When the silicon nano-tip is on the sample and illuminated, the Raman signal of silicon can be partially absorbed by the sample while passing through it, so that measuring the intensity of the Raman signal of silicon enables us to observe the absorption behavior of the sample at nano-scale. Because the absorbance of light is dependent on the absorption coefficient of the sample as well as its sample topography, it is needed to eliminate the effect of the sample topography from the absorption measurement to technically evaluate the absorption coefficient of the sample. For this purpose, we simultaneously employed two different incident lasers and utilized absorbance ratio between two wavelengths to monitor the absorption coefficient of the sample. As an example, we demonstrated that two types of carbon nanotubes, which have different absorption properties, could be clearly distinguished with nano-scale resolution by our technique.