Designing the Plasmonic Response of Complex Nanoparticle Assemblies

Optoelectronic and biomedical devices harnessing solar energy can be improved by incorporating colloidal soft materials as energy harvesters, waveguides, optical filters, photo- and thermocatalysts, and molecular sensors. Understanding and controlling the light-matter interactions of these components is crucial to improving their performance.

In this talk, I’ll discuss how we use controlled assembly of colloidal nanoparticles to tune their collective optical and mechanical behavior. We have developed a platform where doped semiconductor nanocrystals of tunable size, shape, and chemical composition can be strategically co-assembled into multicomponent superlattices and gels. Using in-house electromagnetic simulations to relate measured optical features to specific structural motifs within the self-assembled materials, we can design self-assembled materials with unique emergent optical features tunable over an enormous range, including epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) behavior, strain-dependent birefringence, and spatially-focused near-field enhancement.

I will also discuss how we formulate optical materials design as an inverse problem, where we first specify target optical behavior and then use numerical optimization to autonomously discover self-assembled nanoparticle materials possessing the desired features.

Speaker: Zach Sherman, University of Washington

Room 3108