MASc

A poster presentation about fiber-based nanoaperture trapping titled ‘Nanoaperture optical fiber tweezers fabricated with a low-cost colloidal pattern transfer method’.

Optical trapping and nanofabrication techniques can be applied with novel chemical methods to develop new devices that can be explored for quantum communication applications.

Nanohole optical tweezers can be used without expensive top-down approaches such as electron microscopy or focused-ion beam milling by using polarization analysis to identify double nanoholes. Different substrates can also improve trapping and tape exfoliation can be used to simplify fabrication.

A conference presentation about using double nanohole optical trapping with erbium-doped nanocrystals titled ‘Enhancing and Isolating Lanthanide-Doped Nanocrystals Using Double Nanohole Optical Tweezers for Quantum Light Sources at 1550 nm’.

Double nanohole optical trapping was used to measure the emission of nanocrystals with discrete levels of erbium ions.

Second harmonic generation is demonstrated in two-dimensional hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) using plasmonic nanorods with low power CW laser excitation.

The geometry of double nanohole plasmonic apertures can be tuned to provide significant emission enhancement from upconversion nanocrystals, compared to using rectangular apertures.

Gap plasmon structures could enable future ultrafast communication and many of the structures needed have already been developed.

Plasmon-enhanced optical trapping was used to isolate nanocrystals with discrete levels of erbium ions. These levels were detected by observing discrete levels of emission from the erbium ions. Future work will investigate nanocrystals containing single erbium ions as single-photon sources.

A research group at the University of Victoria using nanostructured metals for optical trapping. This group uses nanoaperture optical trapping to explore the characteristics of single nanoparticles and proteins.