Light emission from emitters is a valuable piece of information in a variety of sensing and detection techniques, capable of labeling physical and biological processes which occur in the proximity of the emitter. Furthermore, quantum technologies are currently exploiting the statistics of single-emitters light emission aiming at turning particular emitters into fundamental units to sustain […]
An electric current can be visualized as a flow of electrons through a conducting piece of material. The less the resistance the material structure opposes to the flow of electrons the better a conductor it is. Part of this resistance appears at the surface, where electrons first encounter the material; as with electromagnetic radiation – […]
Future information and communication technologies will rely on the manipulation of not only electrons but also of light at the nanometer-scale. Squeezing light to such a small size has been a major goal in nanophotonics for many years. Particularly strong light squeezing can be achieved with polaritons, quasiparticles resulting from the strong coupling of photons […]
Chemistry • DIPC Biochemistry • DIPC Interfaces • DIPC Particle Physics • Materials • Particle physics
A new fluorescent bicolour indicator, an organic molecule, could help detect the daughter atom of a neutrinoless double beta decay. If this is achieved, there would be an explanation to the matter-anti matter asymmetry in the universe. Experiments performed in 1909 by Geiger and Marsden, also called Rutherford gold foil experiment because Rutherford was their […]
In science we try to be very precise with the wording of our texts. One of the consequences of this is that we are not afraid of repeating some words in a paragraph, or even in a sentence, if that contributes to avoid possible misunderstandings, even though it may be not recommended stylistically. Another feature […]
When we consider the variety of possible wonder applications of plasmonic nanoparticles we usually forget a key aspect: how these laboratory results can be transformed into something really usable in everyday life. For that to occur some not-that-simple problems must be resolved first. For example, plasmonic nanoparticles exhibit excellent light-harvesting properties in the visible spectral […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics • Theoretical physics
When two photons with the same energy interact with a nonlinear material, they “combine” and generate a new photon with twice the energy of the initial photons. More precisely, two photons at the fundamental frequency are absorbed by a plasmonic structure to emit one photon at the second-harmonic frequency. This is called second-harmonic generation. Second-harmonic […]
We all know what glass is, don’t we? We just point to the nearest window and it is that transparent sheet. Humans have been producing glass for at least 6,000 years, way before they knew how to smelt iron. Actually, the chemistry is well known: to produce window glass we just heat a mixture of […]
Graphene nanoribbons (GNRs), are strips of graphene with ultra-thin width (<50 nm). Graphene ribbons, introduced as a theoretical model by Mitsutaka Fujita and coauthors to examine the edge and nanoscale size effect in graphene, have emerged as a promising material for nanoelectronics, as they combine many of the extraordinary properties of graphene with a high […]
In the quantum theory of many-body systems, collective oscillations are called collective excitations. In a quantum context, everything is quantized. Hence, collective excitations become quantized modes because of the cooperative motion of the whole system as a result of interactions between particles. They may be electronic excitations in atoms and are referred excitons. In most […]