FLEET Seminar: All-dielectric nanophotonics with transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) semiconductors

High-refractive index dielectrics have emerged as an exciting nanophotonic platform to shape and control electromagnetic fields at the nanoscale, offering a toolbox for tailoring light-matter interaction of solid-state quantum emitters via optical Mie resonances in sub-wavelength nanoantennas. Van der Waals (vdW) materials, such as the family of Transition Metal Dichalcogenides (TMDCs), are a powerful system for investigating light-matter interaction at the nanoscale, exhibiting exceptional optical properties in their atomically-thin, monolayer form, with tightly bound excitons, light–valley interactions, and single-photon emitters.Moreover, in their bulk form, TMDCs exhibit large refractive indexes (n>4) and strong optical anisotropy, making them a favourable candidate for the realization of low-loss optical resonances in all-dielectric TMDC nanophotonic structures.

In this seminar, Luca will show how coupling TMDC monolayers of WSe₂ with Mie resonances in dielectric nano-antennas allows the nanoscale positioning and quantum efficiency enhancement of native strain-induced single-photon emitters and will introduce how nanophotonic structures, made exclusively of vdW materials, open to a plethora of possibilities for tailoring light-matter interaction of integrated quantum light sources.

Seminar flyer can be downloaded here.

About the speaker

Luca Sortino obtained a MSc. at the Material Science department at the University of Bicocca Milan, Italy, in 2016. He obtained his PhD in early 2020 at the University of Sheffield, as part of the Marie Skłodowska Curie International Training Network “Spin-NANO”. After a postdoctoral experience at the hybrid plasmonic groups at Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich he obtained a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in 2022 in the same group. His research interest lies between solid-state physics and nanophotonics, with a focus on 2D materials, and with expertise in experimental optics and time-resolved, ultrafast spectroscopy.