Berlin 2012 – scientific programme
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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik
O 40: Focussed session: Coherence and coherent control in nanophotonics and plasmonics I
O 40.5: Talk
Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 12:15–12:30, MA 005
Time-domain simulation of quantum systems coupled to plasmonic nano-structures — Richard Ciesielski, •Andreas Hille, René Kullock, Stefan Grafström, and Lukas M. Eng — TU Dresden, Institut für Angewandte Photophysik, 01062 Dresden
Plasmonic nanostructures deserved an increased attention for the last 20 years due to their appealing optical properties such as high field concentration, enhanced optical transmission or negative refraction. Nevertheless, the most severe drawback of these (mostly metallic) nanostructures are their very high Ohmic losses, which for instance prevent bulk plasmonic applications, e.g. in metamaterials. In 2003, Bergman and Stockman proposed the so-called SPASER concept which compensates losses using optical gain media. This approach is very appealing; however, to date no clear proof of really (over-) compensating these losses in bulk plasmonic materials has been shown. We contribute here to this question by theoretically calculating how gain media couple to plasmonic nanostructures on the quantum mechanical (QM) level using the Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method. DG is a relatively novel but very powerful numerical tool to model optical nanostructures with linear or non-linear optical properties, especially when combined with curved elements. By using time-dependent DG calculations, we study here QM emitters as the gain medium that couple to plasmonic nanoantennas. The nanoantenna is formed by spherical nanoparticles with a diameter of 40 - 100 nm while the QM emitters were chosen to be standard dye molecules.