Supervisors:

Rupert Oulton

Stefan Maier

Myungshik Kim

GENERATION, ROUTING AND NONLINEAR MANIPULATION OF SINGLE PHOTONS VIA SP FOR QUANTUM NANOMETROLOGY AND SENSING
Plasmonics research in recent years has brought about an unprecedented control of light on the nanoscale. Using suitable metal/dielectric nanostructures, sub-wavelength confinement can be achieved resulting in a strong field enhancement that can be harnessed for nonlinear optics applications or single-molecule detection.

The aim of this project is to combine plasmonics with quantum optics, investigating processes such as on-chip spontaneous parametric down-conversion or the generation of orbital-angular-momentum modes with a plasmonic metasurface and subsequent study of the photon count statistics. This might lead to a better understanding of metasurfaces in the single photon limit and their suitability for quantum cryptography. On a longer timescale these techniques will be developed towards applications in metrology and sensing.