Ricerc@Sapienza

In this work we present an approach to induce chiral effects in well-known plasmonic nanohole arrays with triangular unit cell. Arrays with circular nanoholes in metals can exhibit interesting light-matter interaction mechanisms such as surface plasmon polaritons and extraordinary optical transmission. Moving from circular to elliptical shape and tilting the ellipse away from the lattice symmetry lines, a symmetry breaking induces a different absorption of the circularly polarized light of opposite handedness, i.e. circular dichroism.

Throughout the 19th and 20th century, chirality has mostly been associated with chemistry. However, while chirality can be very useful for understanding molecules, molecules are not well suited for understanding chirality. Indeed, the size of atoms, the length of molecular bonds and the orientations of orbitals cannot be varied at will. It is therefore difficult to study the emergence and evolution of chirality in molecules, as a function of geometrical parameters. By contrast, chiral metal nanostructures offer an unprecedented flexibility of design.

High n-type doping in germanium is essential for many electronic and optoelectronic applications especially for high performance Ohmic contacts, lasing and mid-infrared plasmonics. We report on the combination of in situ doping and excimer laser annealing to improve the activation of phosphorous in germanium. An activated n-doping concentration of 8.8??×??1019 cm?3 has been achieved starting from an incorporated phosphorous concentration of 1.1??×??1020 cm?3. Infrared reflectivity data fitted with a multi-layer Drude model indicate good uniformity over a 350?nm thick layer.

Compact samples of nano-helices built by means of a focused ion beam technology with large
bandwidth and high dichroism for circular polarization are promising for the construction of built-in-chip
sensors, where the ideal transducer must be sufficiently confined without compromising its filtering
ability. Direct all-optical measurements revealed the sample’s dichroic character with insufficient details
because of scattering and diffraction interference. On the other hand, photoacoustic measurements

Tunable THz antennas based on a single unpatterned graphene sheet placed inside a grounded dielectric multilayer are studied with the aim of characterizing their performance in terms of pattern reconfigurability, directivity, and radiation efficiency. The considered structures belong to the class of Fabry-Perot cavity (FPC) antennas, whose radiation mechanism relies on the excitation of cylindrical leaky waves with an ordinary (i.e., non-plasmonic) sinusoidal transverse modal profile.

An ultra-compact plasmonics-based sensor is investigated which is excited by Fano resonance. The structure is numerically simulated by the finite-difference time-domain method. The sensor utilizes unique waveguide geometry named as metal-insulator-metal (MIM) waveguide geometry which has an intriguing feature to confine signal far beyond diffraction light. Thus, it is used to devise ultra-compact optical circuits. The MIM waveguide is coupled to a pair of elliptical ring resonators and the interaction between the resonators excites special mode which is known as Fano resonance mode.