Physics (Internal)

VANADIUM DIOXIDE: THE NEVER-ENDING STORY?

This event is part of the Biophysics/Condensed Matter Seminar Series.

Abstract: Since its discovery half a century ago, the insulator-to-metal transition in vanadium dioxide (VO₂) has been an object of both scientific and technological attention.  In the last decade, that attention has produced a roughly exponential growth in VO₂-related publications.  Our interest in VO₂ at the micro- and nano-length and femtosecond time-scales, has been driven in part by potential applications, most recently in using micron-size patches of VO₂ as the switching element in silicon photonic modulators. I will describe our most recent experiments focused on key scientific issues related to the potential for making ultrafast optical modulators with VO₂ micro- and nanostructures, including:  (1) using gold nanodisks as plasmonic antennas to probe the interband response during the insulator-to-metal transition; (2) femtosecond laser studies of near-threshold switching in the visible and near-infrared; and (3) plasmonically driven ultrafast electron injection in nanostructured VO₂.