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

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

What happens when you shine a UV laser onto a single aluminum nanohole filled with water? See the video below of the experiment, accelerated 5x. Holes get brighter once exposed to the laser: this is laser-induced corrosion of the aluminum film by water molecules. It is not direct laser damage (we use a power of 60 µW, 3x below the direct photodama

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

Our team-member Aleksandr Barulin recently got awarded the thesis prize of the Doctoral School "Physics and Sciences of the Matter" for his PhD work. Congratulations Aleksandr for this well-deserved prize!

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

Ultraviolet plasmonics has attracted recently a growing attention owing to the possibility to take advantage of increased light-matter interaction in the UV range. However, the core question of demonstrating the capacity of UV plasmonic structures to enhance the radiative emission rate of proteins has remained unproven yet. In a recent article publ

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

Back into direct physical format, Jerome will participate to the next "Nuit Européenne des Chercheurs" at Aix en Provence on Sept. 24th. More details and program here.

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