We have a new publication in Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters on the “Beaming Elastic and SERS Emission from Bent-Plasmonic Nanowire on a Mirror Cavity”
In short, we show, how by bending a nanowire we can narrowly beam the light scattered from molecules (see adjoining picture).
Optical emission from quantum objects such as atoms and molecules are very sensitive to their local surroundings. One of the current challenges in controlling optical emission from molecules at subwavelength scale is to narrow their scattering directivity. In the context of molecules, controlling light scattering at sub-wavelength scale has utility in optical trapping of molecules, molecular QED, cavity molecular mechanics, molecular quantum optics and many other areas of research.
Thanks to the great effort by Sunny Tiwari in my lab, who in the middle of the pandemic, tirelessly executed the idea of beaming elastic and Raman scattering emission from molecules in the vicinity of a bent plasmonic silver nanowire resting on a metallic mirror. He was ably supported by Adarsh (now at ETH), Dipta and Shailendra. Together, they experimentally confirmed the beaming characteristics from this geometry and corroborated with elaborate numerical simulations.
This work further motivates questions related to directivity control for single photon emitters and can be potentially harnessed for momentum-space engineering of nano-optical forces……
we say bend the light like a nanowire…
DOI of JPCL article : https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01923
arxiv version : https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09347v1
Scatterings 