Plasmonic nano-optical trapping has revolutionized the use of optical tweezers, and a lot of attention has been devoted to the optical gradient force. However, the metal absorbs part of the incident light, leading to a temperature gradient responsible for an additional thermophoretic force which remains largely overlooked in plasmonic trapping. In

The Green function plays a central role in wave propagation, as it describes the response of a system to an arbitrary impulse. However, measuring it experimentally is very challenging since it needs to be measured in both amplitude and phase with deep subwavelength spatial resolution. These highly demanding requirements have significantly limited t

Now published in Photoniques , the journal of the French Optical Society, international (english) edition: Is there a bright spot in the shadow of an opaque disk? Nearly 200 years ago, Augustin Fresnel and François Arago’s remarkable answer to this question validated the wave theory of light and inaugurated the modern theories of diffraction. To

The ability to design light concentrators directly integrated on a chip is an issue in many applications of optics. Published recently in APL Photonics, we have developed a CMOS compatible metasurface lens based on the index profiles derived from the Maxwell fish-eye distribution. Based on this rational physics-driven design, we fabricate and chara

Resonant nanophotonics + gap antenna + microwave electromagnetism + filmed by my daughter + captain Harlock soundtrack + in my kitchen = blows my mind

Since October, we welcome Prithu Roy as new PhD applicant in our group. Looking forward to exploring the nanoworld in UV!

After a 3-year endeavour, Aleksandr Barulin defended his PhD on Dec 4th 2020. Thesis committee: - Thomas Ebbesen, ISIS, Université de Strasbourg, France, President - Niek van Hulst, ICFO-Institut de Ciences Fotoniques, Spain, Reviewer - Christian Eggeling, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany, Reviewer - Hervé Rigneault, Institut Fresnel

An international study entitled "updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators" recently measured the impact of scientific citations. 160,000 scientists -corresponding to the world's top 2% in their respective fields- have seen their output analyzed from 1960 to 2019 and classified into different scientific fields. In th

Plasmonic nano-optical tweezers offers unprecedented abilities to manipulate nano-objects. However, measuring the trap stiffness at nanoscale dimensions remains a technical challenge, and as a consequence, very few reports have explored plasmonic designs to optimize their trapping performance. In a recent publication released in Nanoscale, we detai