Research
Our work is organized around four questions. They share one platform, the nanogap cavity, and one aim: to find out what an electromagnetic environment beyond anything found in nature can do to light, to quantum emitters, and to matter.
How are the rules of light–matter interaction rewritten when the field varies across a single emitter?
We fabricate optical cavities with gaps of a few nanometers, confining light to volumes more than ten thousand times smaller than a cubic wavelength. In this regime the usual rules of light–matter interaction stop applying.
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What can a single emitter do when the vacuum around it is engineered?
We place one, two, or a few quantum emitters inside nanogap cavities and study how the cavity rewrites their interaction with the vacuum — making, among other things, single-photon sources at telecom wavelengths with lifetimes of tens of picoseconds.
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Can the environment itself be changed faster than the matter inside it can respond?
Extreme confinement creates enormous fields and energy densities in nanoscale volumes, where a few nanometers of ordinary dielectric become an efficient source of harmonic generation. A femtosecond pump–probe laboratory, now being built, will let us follow these processes in time.
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Can a nanogap drive a material into states it cannot reach on its own?
A nanogap concentrates the optical field a hundredfold in a single 50 nm patch. A two-dimensional magnet or semiconductor under a cube can therefore be dressed by a field strong enough to reshape its energy levels, while the incident beam stays weak enough not to heat the sample.
Explore this areaThe same nanogap platform has practical uses we have pursued with collaborators: ultrafast, spectrally selective photodetectors; metasurfaces for sensing and computing, developed in the eight-university Meta-Imaging MURI; and fluorescence-enhancing surfaces for point-of-care biomedical diagnostics, developed at Duke under an NIH R01 program with clinical partners. We are open to collaborations that bring the platform to sensing, imaging, and diagnostics, and welcome contact from Copenhagen's biomedical and health-technology community.