Optical Characterization and Nanophotonics Laboratory

Luca Dal Negro Collaborator Electrical and Computer Engineering 8 St.Mary's Street Email: dalnegro http://www.bu.edu/nano/

Biography

RESEARCH INTERESTS:

The control of nanomaterials, structures and optical fields lies at the heart of the current nanotechnology revolution and offers unprecedented opportunities to engineer novel functional elements on the nanoscale. Dal Negro’s group research activities are focused on the nano-fabrication, optical characterization and electromagnetic modeling of metal-dielectric nanomaterials and nanostructures for on-chip nanophotonics applications. In particular, we develop efficient nanoscale light sources and laser structures based on the cost-effective silicon technology and we study the unique behavior of optical fields confined on the nanoscale by complex media such as fractals, quasi-crystals and pseudo-random systems. Our combined computational and experimental activities are aimed at advancing the fields of silicon photonics and nanoplasmonics by demonstrating novel concepts and device structures for on-chip optical sensing, light emission, energy harvesting and detection.

Our research efforts involve ab-initio electrodynamical modeling, materials synthesis, and optical characterization and of nanostructures. In particular, we fabricate and study the linear and nonlinear optical properties of silicon-based nanostructures, optical bio-polymers and semiconductor quantum dots. In addition, using electron-beam nanolithography we design and fabricate large-scale, resonant arrays of nanoparticles and study their photonic-plasmonic behavior in relation to light-matter coupling, multiple light scattering, radiative processes (light emission), and optical nonlinearity.