WUHAN, China (April 3, 2019) - Wuhan Optoelectronics Forum No. 153 was successfully held in Auditorium A101 at Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics (WNLO) in the afternoon of April 3. Prof. Vahid Sandoghdar from Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light delivered an exciting talk entitled Efficiency in The Interaction of Light and Matter: From Nano-quantum Optics to Nanobiophotonics. Dr. Xuewen Chen, from WNLO chaired the forum. Prof. Xinliang Zhang, vice-president of HUST, awarded Prof. Vahid Sandoghdar the forum medal.
Light-matter interaction at the nanometer scale lies at the heart of elementary optical processes such as absorption, emission or scattering. Over the past two decades, we have realized a series of experiments to investigate the interaction of single photons, single molecules, and single nanoparticles in a controlled fashion. In this presentation, I will report on recent studies, where we reach near-unity efficiency in the coupling of single photons to single molecules. Furthermore, I will show how the underlying mechanisms that play a central role in quantum optics, e.g. interference, help detect single biological nanoparticles such as viruses and small proteins with high spatial and temporal resolutions.
Vahid Sandoghdar obtained his B.S. in physics from the University of California at Davis in 1987 and Ph.D. in physics from Yale University in 1993. After a postdoctoral stay at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris he moved to the University of Konstanz in Germany, where he started a new line of research to combine single molecule spectroscopy, scanning probe microscopy and quantum optics. In 2001, he accepted a chair at the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. In 2011, he became director at the newly established Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen and Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. He is the founder of the new Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin, a joint research center that aims to address questions in fundamental medical research with physical and mathematical methods.Sandoghdar is one of the founders of the field of Nano-Optics, which merges various methods and research areas to investigate fundamental issues in the interaction between light and matter at the nanometer scale. His current research ranges from quantum optics, plasmonics and ultrahigh resolution microscopy to nanobiophysics.
