Abstract: Light-matter interactions mediated by photonic quasiparticles play a crucial role in realizing next-generation photonic devices by unlocking phenomena that are not accessible with free-space photons and providing efficient interfaces for quantum systems. In the first part of the presentation, I will present the first experimental demonstration of a mid-infrared light-emitting mechanism originating from an ultrafast coupling of optically excited carriers into hot plasmon excitations in graphene. Such excitations show gate-tunable, non-Planckian emission characteristics due to the atom-level confinement of the electromagnetic states. These findings for plasmon emission in photo-inverted graphene open a new path for the exploration of mid-infrared emission processes, and this mechanism can potentially be exploited for both far-field and near-field applications for strong optical field generation. In the second part of the presentation, I will present a diamond resonant metasurface that can mediate efficient spin-photon interactions and enable a new type of quantum imaging system. This quantum metasurface containing nitrogen-vacancy (NV) spin ensembles coherently encodes information about the local magnetic field on spin-dependent phase and amplitude changes of near-telecom light. The projected performance makes the studied quantum imaging metasurface appealing for the most demanding applications such as imaging through scattering tissues and spatially resolved chemical NMR detection.
Bio: Laura Kim is currently an IC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Quantum Photonics Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her B.S. degree in chemical engineering and Ph.D. degree in materials science, both from the California Institute of Technology. She is an EECS Rising Star and a recipient of Gary Malouf Foundation Award and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Her doctoral research focused on understanding photonic-quasiparticle-driven light-matter interactions in low dimensional materials. Her current research involves developing nanoscale quantum sensing and imaging strategies.
