高兆兰讲座（第二十五期）（2025年8月20日10:00）：The first thirty years of Nanophotonics: a personal journey

主持人：周张凯 教授

报告简介：During the last thirty years, a new area of research within Physics has emerged, aiming to control the flow of light at length scales of the order or even smaller than the wavelength. This new frontier is named Nanophotonics and has become an interdisciplinary field of research that combines expertise from Condensed Matter Physics, Classical and Quantum Optics and Materials Science. The basic idea of Nanophotonics is to tune the material properties of the medium in which light flows to devise its propagation at will. To frame our own research, in the first part of my talk I will briefly introduce the three main developments that have emerged in Nanophotonics during these thirty years: Photonic Crystals, Plasmonics and Metamaterials.

The main part of the presentation will be devoted to describing two main findings achieved in our theoretical group in this field of research: the phenomenon of the transmission of light through subwavelength apertures and the concept of spoof surface plasmons. First, we will show how surface plasmons can be utilized to overcome the two main limitations that diffraction imposes to light when passing through subwavelength apertures: low transmission and propagation into all directions. Next, we will discuss how structuring metallic surfaces allows for the support of surface electromagnetic modes at low frequencies that mimic the behavior of surface plasmons at optical frequencies. We will also illustrate how these spoof surface plasmon modes can be used in applications that require the manipulation of electromagnetic fields at microwave and terahertz frequencies.

Finally, we will briefly show how light-matter interaction can be used not only to control light propagation as classical Nanophotonics does but, by taking advantage of the quantum hybrid nature of the polaritons formed when light-matter coupling is strong enough, to modify material and chemical properties by tailoring vacuum electromagnetic fields.

报告人简介：Francisco J. Garcia-Vidal教授是西班牙皇家马德里自治大学物理系讲席教授、凝聚态物理中心（IFIMAC）创始主任，国际纳米光子学领域权威学者，研究方向涵盖表面等离子体、超材料及量子纳米光子学。Francisco J. Garcia-Vidal 教授在纳米光子学领域成就卓越，是该领域的顶尖学者之一。他长期致力于等离子学和超材料等方向的研究，发表了约300篇高质量期刊文章，被引用次数超过48,000次，H-index高达103，并多次入选物理学领域高被引研究人员名单。他还担任过多个重要学术职务，如美国光学学会会士、《Physical Review Letters》的部门副主编等，并荣获King Jaume I基础研究奖和西班牙国家物理学奖等多项荣誉。