Exploring and exploiting light-matter interaction at the nanometer scale: from quantum optics to biophysics
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Lecturer: Vahid Sandoghdar - Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin, Erlangen, Germany
Date: June 21, 2024 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m.
Location: Querzoli

Light-matter interaction at the nanometer scale lies at the heart of elementary optical processes such as absorption, emission or scattering. Over the past two decades, we have realized a series of experiments to investigate the interaction of single photons, single molecules and single nanoparticles. In this presentation, I will report on recent studies, where we reach unity efficiency in the coupling of single photons to single molecules in a microcavity and describe our efforts to exploit this for the realization of complex hybrid states involving a controlled number of molecules and photons. Furthermore, I will show how the underlying mechanisms that play a central role in quantum optics, help detect, image and track single biological nanoparticles such as viruses and small proteins with high spatial and temporal resolutions and in a label-free fashion.