0000000000534591
AUTHOR
Marie-maxime Mennemanteuil
Nonlinear photon-assisted tunneling transport in optical gap antennas.
International audience; We introduce strongly coupled optical gap antennas to interface optical radiation with current-carrying electrons at the nanoscale. The transducer relies on the nonlinear optical and electrical properties of an optical gap antenna operating in the tunneling regime. We discuss the underlying physical mechanisms controlling the conversion involving d-band electrons and demonstrate that a simple two-wire optical antenna can provide advanced optoelectronic functionalities beyond tailoring the electromagnetic response of a single emitter. Interfacing an electronic command layer with a nanoscale optical device may thus be facilitated by the optical rectennas discussed here.
Exploring titanium dioxide as a new photonic platform
International audience; We report the development of titanium dioxide-based waveguides for applications in the near-and mid-infrared. Thanks to embedded metal grating couplers, we demonstrate error free 10 Gbit/s optical transmissions at 1.55 and 2 µm. We also demonstrate octave-spanning supercontinuum in cm-long waveguides. We explore the way to improve such waveguides through optimized fabrication process.
Le dioxyde de titane pour la photonique
National audience
Spontaneous hot-electron light emission from electron-fed optical antennas
Nanoscale electronics and photonics are among the most promising research areas providing functional nano-components for data transfer and signal processing. By adopting metal-based optical antennas as a disruptive technological vehicle, we demonstrate that these two device-generating technologies can be interfaced to create an electronically-driven self-emitting unit. This nanoscale plasmonic transmitter operates by injecting electrons in a contacted tunneling antenna feedgap. Under certain operating conditions, we show that the antenna enters a highly nonlinear regime in which the energy of the emitted photons exceeds the quantum limit imposed by the applied bias. We propose a model based…
Pre-determining the location of electromigrated gaps by nonlinear optical imaging
In this paper we describe a nonlinear imaging method employed to spatially map the occurrence of constrictions occurring on an electrically-stressed gold nanowire. The approach consists at measuring the influence of a tightly focused ultrafast pulsed laser on the electronic transport in the nanowire. We found that structural defects distributed along the nanowire are efficient nonlinear optical sources of radiation and that the differential conductance is significantly decreased when the laser is incident on such electrically-induced morphological changes. This imaging technique is applied to pre-determined the location of the electrical failure before it occurs.