Event
MSE Seminar Series: Matthew Pelton
Friday, November 7, 2014
1:00 p.m.
Room 2108, Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Bldg.
JoAnne Kagle
301 405 5240
jkagle@umd.edu
New Physics and Functionality with Nanophotonic Materials: Nanoplatelet Lasers, Vibrating Metal Nanoparticles, and Coupled Metal-Semiconductor Nonlinear Hybrids
Matthew Pelton
Assistant Professor
Department of Physics
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Semiconductor nanocrystals and metal nanoparticles are key building blocks for nanophotonics, because they both interact strongly with light in a way that can be tuned by changing the size, shape, and composition of the particles. The increasing ability to control the nanoscale structure of these materials continues to provide new functionalities and to reveal new material properties. I will discuss some of my recent attempts to understand and take advantage of structure-property relationships for nanophotonic materials:
(1) Flat, thin semiconductor nanocrystals, or nanoplatelets, outperform all previous semiconductor nanocrystals as the active materials for lasers, largely due to the unique, structure-dependent carrier dynamics in the nanoplatelets.
(2) All-optical measurements of the mechanical vibrations of plasmonic metal nanoparticles reveal complex, viscoelastic behavior in simple fluids, and have the promise to enable ultrasensitive mass detection.
(3) Coherent coupling of plasmonic metal nanoparticles to semiconductor nanocrystals has the potential to produce strong, ultrafast nonlinearities, which may enable all-optical classical and quantum information processing.
About the Speaker
Matthew Pelton received a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto in 1996 and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 2002. Following postdoctoral positions at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and at the University of Chicago, he joined the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory, where he was a scientific staff member from 2006 until 2013. In fall 2013, he joined the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
