Plasmonics and for and Conversion

Metamaterials and plasmonic materials have yielded new modes of light localization and dispersion control that are not available in ordinary homogeneous photonic media. These have enabled creation of metallodielectric composites with an enhanced local density of optical states and structures that act as slow light structures, greatly enhancing the degree of optical absorption and spontaneous emission. I will begin by surveying the conditions for plasmonic and artificial magnetic response and the resulting conditions for the optical wavevector, power flow, and phase propagation. Then basic nanophotonic motifs for and plasmonic structure design will be introduced. New component materials for metamaterials design will be discussed, including conducting oxides, nitrides and two-dimensional materials such as graphene that give rise to electrical tunability of the complex refractive index, examples of integrated photonic device applications will be given. Further, criteria for plasmonic and metamaterial structures in solar energy conversion will be outlined, including designs to maximize absorption of broadband unpolarized radiation over a wide range of incidence angles, as is needed in solar energy conversion applications. Finally, emerging and future directions for nanophotonics, such as exploiting hot carrier excitation and quantum phenomena will be surveyed.

Web Resources: LMI-EFRC: http://lmi.caltech.edu/ Atwater Group: http://daedalus.caltech.edu/

Biography

Harry Atwater is the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology. Professor Atwater received his B. S., M. S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology respectively in 1981, 1983 and 1987, and has been a member of the Caltech faculty since 1988. Atwater’s scientific interests have two themes: plasmonics and optical metamaterials as well as and solar energy. He was an early pioneer in nanophotonics and plasmonics, and has authored or co-authored more than 400 publications; his group’s work has appeared in Science, Nature Materials, Nature Photonics, PNAS, Advanced Materials and Scientific American. Atwater currently serves as Director of the Light-Matter Interactions Energy Frontier Research Center, and is also Director of Caltech Resnick Institute for Science. His group have

developed principles for light management in photovoltaics and have created new high efficiency solar cell designs. He is co-founder and chief technical advisor for Alta Devices, a venture- backed company in Santa Clara, CA, which has developed a low cost GaAs photovoltaics technology with world record cell efficiency. He was co-founder (2006) and Chair (2008) of the Gordon Research Conference on Plasmonics, and is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society (2012), and is founding Editor in Chief of ACS Photonics (2013).