Fabian Menges - Multimodal thermoscopy - Nanoimaging with heat and light

  • Date: Nov 6, 2020
  • Time: 11:00 AM - 01:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Room: Online
Fabian Menges - Multimodal thermoscopy - Nanoimaging with heat and light

The liveliness of our world is encoded in the ubiquity of thermal non-equilibrium processes. This is why any technology, be it related to the switching of a transistor or the state preparation of a qubit, is fueled by mankind’s ability to understand and control how dissipation affects the dynamics of matter, turns structures into complex systems, and quantum into classical states.

In this seminar, I will first give a brief glimpse on some of the central questions that underlie our research efforts, such as: How to probe the quantum limits of heat transfer, measure temperature on small scales, or use light to characterize chemical heterogeneities on nanometer scales? How can dissipation be exploited rather than avoided to deliberately introduce new states of matter? What are the prospects of using surface confined electro-magnetic fields to control material functionalities emerging away-from equilibrium?

I’ll than show that addressing each of these questions is eminently linked to the invention of new nanoimaging and spectroscopy techniques to trace the intricate spatio-spectral dissipation dynamics of matter. At the more technical level, I’ll explain how to use scanning probe sensors and infrared light sources to map local temperature fields, detect photo-induced forces in tip-sample nanocavities, and explore light-matter interactions spanning widely separated length and time scales – from nanometers to microns and femto- to milliseconds. Finally, I’ll give an outlook on our ongoing endeavor towards ultrafast thermo-plasmonic nanoimaging with adiabatically compressed surface polaritons, and discuss how our research work can act as scientific incubator to study the thermodynamic limits of ‘photon-dressed’ matter with judicious designed thermal reservoir couplings.
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