Description:

The Institute for Quantum Information Research and Engineering (INQUIRE) is pleased to welcome Professor Thomas W. Ebbesen from the University of Strasbourg, France, hosted by Professor Roel Tempelaar.

INQUIRE Seminar
Date: Thursday, March 20
Time: 4:00pm (CT)
Location: Pancoe Auditorium
Zoom: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/93450525911 (passcode: INQUIREnu)

Title: The Alchemy of Vacuum
Abstract: Over the past decade, the possibility of manipulating material and chemical properties by using hybrid light-matter states has stimulated considerable interest [1,2]. Such hybrid light-matter states can be generated by strongly coupling the electronic or the vibrational transitions of a material, to the spatially confined electromagnetic field of an optical resonator. Most importantly, this occurs even in the dark because the coupling involves the zero-point electromagnetic fluctuations of the resonator, the vacuum field. After introducing the fundamental concepts, examples of modified properties of strongly coupled systems, such as chemical reactivity, charge and energy transport, and magnetism will be given to illustrate the broad potential of light-matter states.

About Prof. Ebbesen:
Thomas W. Ebbesen is a Franco-Norwegian physical chemist. He was educated in the United States and France, receiving his bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College (USA) and his PhD from the Curie University in Paris. He then did research in both the US and Japan, most notably at the NEC Fundamental Research Laboratories, before returning to France in 1999 to help build a new institute (ISIS) at the University of Strasbourg.  He is currently the director of the Jean-Marie Lehn Foundation and the Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Studies (www.usias.fr). He holds the chair of physical chemistry of light-matter interactions. The author of many papers and patents, Ebbesen has received numerous awards for his pioneering research including the 2014 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience for his transformative contributions to nano-optics. Over the past 15 years, his team made the first demonstrations that chemistry and ground state material properties can be modified by coupling electronic and vibrational transitions to the vacuum electromagnetic field. For this work, he received the Gold Medal (the highest French distinction given normally only to one person a year all fields confounded). He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and foreign member of the French Academy of Science.

Hosted by Roel Tempelaar

For more information, please contact Keller Paulson at keller.paulson@northwestern.edu.