Title: Nanoplasmonics and Spaser

Speaker: Mark I. Stockman

Abstract:
Nanoplasmonics deals with collective electron excitations at the surfaces of metal nanostructures, called surface plasmons. The  surface plasmons localize and nano-concentrate optical energy creating highly enhanced local fields. Nanoplasmonics has numerous applications in science, technology, biomedicine, environmental monitoring, and defense, which will be briefly reviewed in this talk.

There is an all-important need in active devices capable of generating and amplifying coherent optical fields on the nanoscale analogous  to  lasers and  amplifiers of the conventional optics or transistors of microelectronics. Such an active device is the spaser (surface plasmon amplification by stimulated  emission of radiation), also called nanolaser. We will review theory extensive experiments on spasers. We will focus on two new theoretical ideas in the field of spasers: spaser with electric pumping via quantum wire and quantum-cascade graphene spaser. A recent breakthrough in ultrasensitive detection  of explosives using the spaser will be presented.

In perspective, the spasers will have applications as ultrafast nanoamplifiers for petahertz processors, nanoscale sources of coherent and intense optical fields, ultra-bright nano-labels, and others.

Speaker Bio:
Mark I. Stockman received his Ph.D. and D.Sc. degrees from the Institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a professor of  physics  and  the  director  of  the  Center  for Nano-Optics (CeNO) at Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), Optical Society of America (OSA), and SPIE (the International Society for Optics and Photonics). He has served as a distinguished visiting professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan (France) and as a visiting professor at Ecole Supérieure de Physique and de Chimie Industrielle (Paris,  France), and also as a guest professor at University of Stuttgart (Germany), Max Plank Institute for Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany), and Ludwig Maximilian University (Munich, Germany). A major direction of his research is theoretical nanoplasmonics, in particular, ultrafast and nonlinear nanoscale optical phenomena. He is a  co-inventor  of the spaser (nanoplasmonic laser). He is the author of over 180 major research papers and has presented numerous plenary, keynote, and invited talks at major international  conferences. He has taught courses on nanoplasmonics and related topics at many major international meetings and scientific institutions in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia.