Condensed Matter Physics Seminar

2 p.m., Thursday, February 13, 2003
Room 1201, Physics Building

 Light-controlled photon tunneling through nonlinear nanoholes

Igor Smolyaninov

(Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland)

Abstract:  Experimental observation of photon tunneling gated by light at a different wavelength in an artificially created array of nanometer scale cylindrical channels in a thick gold film will be discussed. Polarization properties of gated light provide strong proof of the enhanced nonlinear optical mixing in nanometric channels involved in the process. These observations together with the recently observed indications of the existence of "single-photon tunneling" effect suggest the possibility of building a new class of gated photon tunneling devices for massive all-optical signal and image processing and quantum computing. Nonlinear optical interactions of cylindrical surface plasmons involved in the observed effects will be discussed. Similarities between nonlinear optical plasmon-plasmon interactions in a cylindrical mesoscopic system and lower-dimensional Kaluza-Klein theories will be discussed. These similarities indicate that plasmon states with non-zero angular momenta exhibit strong long-range interaction with each other via exchange of plasmons with zero angular momentum. This conclusion has been confirmed by explicit solution of the nonlinear Maxwell equations.  Thus, informal analogy can be drawn between the single-electron and single-photon tunneling effects.

References: PRL 88, 187402 (2002), PRB 66, 205414 (2002), cond-mat/0212185

Host:  Victor Yakovenko
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