Unconventional Light Wave Oscillations in Plasmonic Nanostructures
by
Mário G. Silveirinha((Instituto de Telecomunicações, UC)
→
UTC
Sala de Conferências no 3º andar (LIP Coimbra / Departamento de Física)
Sala de Conferências no 3º andar
LIP Coimbra / Departamento de Física
Description
In open systems the energy associated with a photonic mode may continuously leak away in the form of a radiated wave, and hence the lifetimes of all natural oscillations are finite. This property is closely related to the problem of instability of the Rutherford atom in classical physics. In this talk, I will theoretically show that in the limit of vanishing material loss plasmonic materials offer the opportunity to have light localization in open bounded systems with infinitely long oscillation lifetimes and no radiation loss. In the second part of the talk, I will show that when an (uncharged) plasmonic material is set in relative motion with respect to another (uncharged) polarizable body the combined system may be electromagnetically unstable such that if the relative velocity is enforced to remain constant the system may support natural oscillations that grow exponentially with time. This new phenomenon is analogous to the Cherenkov effect, but for uncharged polarizable bodies.
Biography:
Mário G. Silveirinha received the Licenciado degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (with a minor in Applied Mathematics) from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal, in 2003. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He is also the leader of the Radio Microwave and Millimeter Waves research group in the Coimbra site of Instituto de Telecomunicações (www.it.pt). He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania during several periods in 2004-2005 and 2010-2011. He is founding editor of the APS journal Physical Review Applied. His research interests include electromagnetic metamaterials, plasmonics and semiconductor physics (www.deec.uc.pt/~mgoncalo/research).
