ORC Seminar Series

Maxim Bashevoy
ORC

Date: Wednesday 27 February
Time: 2pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre C, Building 46

The experimental setup probing optical properties of nanostructures with electron beam has been developed. The setup allows for acquisition of spatially resolved electron-induced light emission spectra with the resolution of a scanning electron microscope. The phenomena of light emission from unstructured gold surface, gratings, single nanoparticles and nanodimers, resulting from the excitation of plasmons with an electron beam, has been analyzed.

It has been found for the first time that the power-flow lines of linear polarized monochromatic light interacting with a metallic nanoparticle, in the proximity of its plasmon resonance, form whirlpool-like nanoscale optical vortices (optical whirlpools). Two types vortices: inward and outward, were independently found and studied in detail for both spherical and spheroidal particles using analytical Mie theory and the Finite Element method.

Maxim Bashevoy is a PhD student at the ORC. He was awarded an MSc, summa cum laude, in 2003 from Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU). In 2004 he joined Southampton University and continued his efforts in numerical modelling of light diffraction on nanoobjects.