For the development, application and commercialization of angle-resolved spectroscopy Albert Polman received in 2014 the Innovation in Materials Characterisation Award. In the current issue of the MRS bulletin, a special article has been published based on Polman’s Award presentation during the MRS Spring Meeting in San Fransisco.

With the growing importance of nanotechnology, the demand for high-resolution microscopy and characterization techniques has tremendously increased. Conventional optical microscopy is limited in resolution by the diffraction limit for light, making it unsuitable for optical studies at the nanoscale.

By using cathodoluminescence spectroscopy engineers from AMOLF have demonstrated the use of this new technique for the excitation of plasmons in single metal nanoparticles, surface plasmon polaritons at metal surfaces, resonant Mie modes in dielectric nanostructures, and cavity modes and Bloch modes in photonic crystals. This system has to date already led to over 30 scientific publications.

Unprecedented technological opportunities

Using angle-resolved mode allows for the detection of the directionality of the emitted light, enabling to derive the nature of localized modes and the dispersion of propagation modes in dielectric and plasmonic geometries. Furthermore, the use of angle-resolved cathodoluminescence will open up new technological opportunities, such as highly sensitive chemical sensing, lab-on-chip technology, integrated optics, improving the performance of photodetectors or light emitting devices, and increasing the efficiency of solar cells, and more.

2015 MRS Spring Meeting

As a result of the tremendous increase for new microscopy techniques, DELMIC is co-sponsor of the parallel symposium ZZ during the 2015 MRS Spring Meeting in San Fransisco on Materials Information Using Novel Techniques in Electron Microscopy. This symposium highlights the state-of-the-art in spectroscopic methods used in electron microscopy and their application to understand materials properties. In particular, the aim is to show how properties of materials can be probed with high spatial resolution by using e.g. cathodoluminescence in both two and three dimensions.

Reference & More information

MRS Symposium ZZ: Materials Information Using Novel Techniques in Electron Microscopy

Cathodoluminescence microscopy: Optical imaging and spectroscopy with deep-subwavelength resolution. MRS Bulletin, 40 (April 2015), doi:10.1557/mrs.2015.64.

FOM Institute AMOLF, Photonic Materials Group