All-optical switching of a microcavity repeated at terahertz rates.

We have repeatedly and reproducibly switched a GaAs-AlAs planar microcavity operating in the "original" telecom band by exploiting the virtually instantaneous electronic Kerr effect. We achieve repetition times as fast as 300 fs, thereby breaking the terahertz modulation barrier. The rate of the switching in our experiments is only determined by optics and not by material-related relaxation. Our results offer opportunities for fundamental studies of cavity quantum electrodynamics and optical information processing in the subpicosecond time scale.

Optical Characterization of Plasmonic Indium Lattices Fabricated via Electrochemical Deposition.

The optical properties of periodic metallic nanoparticle lattices have found many exciting applications. Indium is an emerging plasmonic material that offers to extend the plasmonic applications given by gold and silver from the visible to the ultraviolet spectral range, with applications in imaging, sensing, and lasing. Due to the high vapor pressure/low melting temperature of indium, nanofabrication of ordered metallic nanoparticles is nontrivial. In this work, we show the potential of selective area electrochemical deposition to generate large-area lattices of In pillars for plasmonic applications. We study the optical response of the In lattices by means of angle-dependent extinction measurements demonstrating strong plasmonic surface lattice resonances and a good agreement with numerical simulations. The results open avenues toward high-quality lattices of plasmonic indium nanoparticles and can be extended to other promising plasmonic materials that can be electrochemically grown.

Super-Resolution without Imaging: Library-Based Approaches Using Near-to-Far-Field Transduction by a Nanophotonic Structure.

Super-resolution imaging is often viewed in terms of engineering narrow point spread functions, but nanoscale optical metrology can be performed without real-space imaging altogether. In this paper, we investigate how partial knowledge of scattering nanostructures enables extraction of nanoscale spatial information from far-field radiation patterns. We use principal component analysis to find patterns in calibration data and use these patterns to retrieve the position of a point source of light. In an experimental realization using angle-resolved cathodoluminescence, we retrieve the light source position with an average error below λ/100. The patterns found by principal component analysis reflect the underlying scattering physics and reveal the role the scattering nanostructure plays in localization success. The technique described here is highly general and can be applied to gain insight into and perform subdiffractive parameter retrieval in various applications.