Title

Organic Molecules Coming of Age in Quantum Optics

Speaker

Prof. Vahid Sandoghdar

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Germany

Time

4：00pm, April 8, 2019

Place

Room 9004 at the HFNL building

Prof. Vahid Sandoghdar received his B. S. degree from University of California, Davis, USA in 1987 and his Ph. D. degree in Physics from Yale University, New Haven, USA in 1993 under Prof. E. A. Hinds. He moved to Ecole Normale Supérieure, France as a postdoc, before joining the University of Konstanz, Germany in 1996. From 2001 to 2011, he worked as full professor at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland. He has been a director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Germany, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of experimental physics at Friedrich Alexander University since 2011. His research areas include nano-quantum-optics, plasmonics, nanobiophotonics and sensing, and ultrahigh resolution optical imaging. He is a fellow of the Optical Society (OSA).

Abstract

The interaction of light and matter at the nanometer scale lies at the heart of quantum optics because it concerns elementary processes such as absorption or emission of a photon by an atom. Over the past decade, we have shown that direct coupling of a photon to a single two-level atom should be possible via tight focusing. However, because transitions in quantum emitters are typically not closed, laboratory demonstrations of this idea fall short of the theoretical prediction. In this presentation I shall report on recent achievements, where the branching ratio of a single organic molecule is improved by a substantial Purcell effect when coupled to a microcavity. Furthermore, we will discuss coherent linear and nonlinear experiments on molecules coupled to subwavelength waveguides on a chip. Together with their ability to generate narrowband stream of single photons, these developments make organic molecules viable candidates for integration in chip-based quantum optical circuits.