Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2019

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Physics

Advisor

Vinod M. Menon

Committee Members

Adam Braunschweig

Swapan Gayen

Neepa Maitra

Jacob Trevino

Joel Yuen Zhou

Subject Categories

Condensed Matter Physics | Optics

Keywords

metamaterials, surface plasmons, resonance energy transfer, strong coupling, ESIPT

Abstract

In the last three decades, the design and fabrication of different types of photonic nanostructures have allowed us to control and enhance the interaction of light (or photons) with matter (or excitons). In this work, we demonstrate the use of three different nanostructures to control different material properties. The design and fabrication of the nanostructures is discussed along with the results obtained using characterization techniques of angle-resolved white light reflectivity and transmission, and time-resolved and steady-state photoluminescence experiments. Specifically, we demonstrate the use of Optical Topological Transitions (OTT) in metamaterials to show enhanced efficiency in the non-radiative transfer of energy between two sets of molecules where the separation is an order of magnitude higher than the traditional limit beyond which the energy transfer is usually too small to be observed. We also utilize “strong coupling” : a regime of light-matter interaction that results in the formation of part-light, part-matter quasi-particles and new energy eigen states. This phenomenon in exploited in two cases. In the first, we demonstrate strong coupling of an organic molecule, 3-(dimethylamino)-1-(2-hydroxy-4-methoxyphenyl)-2-propen-1-one (HMPP), to a microcavity which results in modified dynamics of Excited State Intramolecular Proton Transport (ESIPT) in HMPP. In the second case, we strongly couple multiple vibronic transitions in another organic molecule, diindenoperylene (DIP), to surface plasmons and demonstrate the resulting changes in emission properties at different temperatures.

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