Light Management with Synthetically-Designed Nanomaterials

Seokhyoung Kim

Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry

Michigan State University

Efficient control of light waves at the nanoscale – including trapping, guiding, absorbing, and emitting photons through resonant optical states – offers opportunities for the development of advanced light-based technologies such as optical data management, quantum information processing, linear and non-linear light generation, and solar energy conversion. In the past decades, chemical synthesis of high-symmetry nanostructures (e.g., nanoparticles) and lithographic fabrication of photonic crystals have propelled the study of fundamental optical states in size scales at or below the diffraction limit. More complex optical interference effects have been further discovered in ordered lattices of nanoresonators, which has launched a search for the new synthetic tools to create precisely-tailored nanostructures. In this presentation, I will introduce a research approach that tailors the geometry of nanostructures to enable new forms of light-matter interactions. An innovative bottom-up synthetic process will be introduced that produces Si nanowire (NW) geometric superlattices (GSLs) with true-nanoscale precision. I will present how rationally-designed NW GSLs can give rise to unique nanophotonic properties including narrowband optical coupling and optical bound states in the continuum (BICs) in the low-absorption limit. I will also introduce our recent effort to expand the morphologically-enabled optical effects to highly-absorbing and highly-emissive semiconductor systems including III-V compound semiconductors and halide perovskites.