New Frontiers for Optoelectronics with Artificial Media

To detect or generate complex light beams that are increasingly needed in biology and photonics (light with non-zero angular momentum and non-classical light), it is necessary to rely on bulky and sophisticated setups, considerably limiting their potential. My ERC project aims at obtaining the same functionalities with a new generation of optoelectronic components of submicron thickness in the near infrared range. This ambitious objective implies to devise radically new ways of creating and manipulating complex light at the nanoscale. This tremendous challenge will be addressed by hybridizing two classes of artificial media — colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) and metamaterials — and leveraging advanced cooperative behaviours within the hybrids. In the new devices, which will be pumped electrically, the active layers will be made of a film of CQDs interwoven with the metallic inclusions of an optical metamaterial. Each demonstrator will be a world first in terms of functionalities, miniaturization and operation principle. Besides, this initiative can be seen as the first of its kind that takes a unified and multidisciplinary view at artificial media, opening new horizons for synthetic composite materials in optics, electronics and optoelectronics. The goal of the present Tremplin-ERC project is to collect sufficient preliminary results for a new ERC application. It aims at strengthening the two technical points that were considered as weak at the ERC-CoG-2016 call. For this, we will need to: (i) show that the losses inherent to metal metamaterials do not constitute a limitation in our specific case. We will fulfill this objective by demonstrating metamaterial-CQD LEDs with external quantum efficiencies at the state-of-the-art (for BQCs). (ii) obtain an experimental signature of a collective behaviour (superradiance) within a CQD-metamaterial hybrid. For this purpose, we will rely on photon correlation measurements. The methodology that we will follow during this one-year program will be that of a design-manufacturing-characterization cycle.