OQE Seminar
Professor Christophe Galland
EPFL
Wednesday, September 23, 2020
11:00 AM
Via Zoom (link at the bottom of this announcement)
Title: Toward molecular cavity optomechanics: light-vibration entanglement and atomic fluctuations in plasmonic nanocavities
Abstract: Molecular systems offer many degrees of freedom potentially useful for quantum technologies, at frequencies ranging from few MH to hundreds of THz. Among them, vibrational modes can be addressed in their quantum ground state even at room-temperature. Inspired by recent developments in cavity optomechanics, we leverage the inelastic scattering of light by molecular vibrations (vibrational Raman scattering) to generate entangled states between photons and phonons in a crystal at ambient conditions, and to demonstrate non-classical statistics of the vibrational excitations.
With the aim of pushing this technique to the level of single molecules, we also develop plasmonic nanocavities with embedded Raman active molecules, which are expected to provide giant optomechanical rates approaching 1 THz. In contrast with naïve models used to simulate the optical response of nanocavities based on bulk material properties, we discover pronounced fluctuations in carrier dynamics inside the plasmonic metal, which are amplified by the large Purcell factor and reflected in “plasmonic blinking”, i.e. jumps in intensity and energy of the intrinsic luminescence from the metal.
Overall, our results evidence that molecular oscillators are promising for ultrafast quantum information processing, but that pushing molecular quantum technologies from ensemble measurements to the nanoscale will require a much deeper understanding of metal-molecule interactions and atomic-scale dynamics in plasmonic nanostructures.
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