Graduate Student
Home Faculty Advisor: Professor Jeremy Baumberg, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge
Host: Faculty Advisor: Professor Paul Alivisatos, Department of Chemistry, UC Berkeley
Alex studied Physics at Manchester University, completing one year of his Master's course at the National University of Singapore. He then joined the Graphene doctoral training center and is working in the Baumberg group where he is studying the excitation kinetics of layered materials in coupled plasmonic nanocavities.
Plasmonic nanogaps can be formed by having Au nanoparticles on an ultrathin material (0.4 – 10nm) placed onto an Au ‘mirror’. The material acts as a spacer between the nanoparticle and Au ‘mirror’. In this way the field is confined to below the diffraction limit inside the spacer material, leading to large field enhancements (up to ~104). Irradiation of this nanoparticle-on-mirror (NPoM) system enables novel interactions with the field, and scattering gives us information on how the material interacts with this field. This proposal aims to combine work in the Alivisatos group on the modification of Au nanoparticles in graphene liquid cells with plasmonic techniques from the Baumberg group.