Few-femtosecond dynamics in plasmonic fields

Plasmonic fields at nanostructures and strong-field photoemission processes at these structures are one of the intensely researched topics of today. Many applications of plasmonic field enhancement on the surface are possible including photovoltaic devices and biosensors. In addition, promising results show that these nanostructures and the localized plasmons excited on them can contribute to future ultrafast optical circuits. Therefore, this topic hold substantial research potential. These include examining the temporal dynamics of ultrashort localized plasmon oscillations produced by various nanoarchitectures with laser pulses of few optical cycles, and measuring the resulting field enhancement.

Investigation of these short plasmon oscillations by multi-photon photemission processes is possible with a hemispherical electron spectrometer. Performing measurements with the help of the nonlinear plasmonic field-autocorrelator required for this is also the task of the candidate including spatially and temporally resolved plasmonic measurements and developing retrieval methods. Furthermore, it is also planned that he/she will extend the method to look into dynamics of a single illuminated nanoparticle. Nanofabrication and imaging of the relevant structures and electromagnetic simulations of nanooptical problems will also be part of the PhD programme.