October 24, 2018
Stephanie Law University of Delaware Assistant Professor Department of Materials Science and Engineering
“Plasmons in complex materials”
4:10 PM, 134 Featheringill Hall Refreshments served at 3:45 Abstract
The fields of plasmonics and metamaterials have seen significant growth in recent years, due to the interest in confining light to subwavelength volumes both for fundamental physics studies as well as novel device architectures. Much of this work has been done in the visible spectral range with traditional metals such as gold and silver. In this talk, I will discuss our recent work using III-V semiconductors and topological insulators for mid-infrared plasmonic and metamaterial devices. First, I will discuss our work using heavily-doped InAs grown by molecular beam epitaxy for mid-infrared plasmonic and metamaterial devices. This material acts as a near-perfect Drude metal with tunable optical properties that can also be integrated with existing semiconductor optoelectronic devices. I will show our results on semiconductor infrared metamaterials, which exhibit negative refraction and collective volume plasmon polariton modes. I will close by discussing our efforts to grow better topological insulator thin films for use as THz plasmonic materials. Initial experiments show that these materials exhibit coupled Dirac plasmon resonances with exceptionally high mode indices and long lifetimes tunable throughout the THz.
Bio
Prof. Law is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Delaware. She received her B.S. in Physics from Iowa State University and her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, where she studied interactions between superconductors and semiconductors. She then held a postdoctoral position in the Electrical Engineering department at Illinois where she demonstrated the feasibility of using doped semiconductors as tunable, low-loss infrared plasmonic materials. Her research investigates the use of novel materials and architectures grown using molecular beam epitaxy for plasmonic and metamaterial devices in the infrared and THz. Prof. Law won the North American Molecular Beam Epitaxy Young Investigator award in 2016 and the Department of Energy Early Career award in 2017.