Electronics and Photonics Seminar with John Weiner

Division of Engineering
“Electronics and Photonics Seminar”
Extraordinary optical transmission revisited:
how light gets through isolated or periodic arrays of
subwavelength slits and holes (or not)

Prof. John Weiner
Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST)
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Gaithersburg, MD USA

Thursday, May 6th
12:45pm in Barus & Holley 751
(pizza and sodas will be offered)

Abstract: The passage of light through apertures much smaller than the
wavelength of the light has proved to be a surprisingly subtle phenomenon.
This talk describes how modern developments in nanofabrication, coherent
light sources and numerical vector field simulations have led to the upending
of early predictions from scalar diffraction theory and classical
electrodynamics. Optical response of real materials to incident coherent
radiation at petahertz frequencies leads to unexpected consequences for
transmission (and extinction) of light through subwavelength aperture arrays.

Biosketch: John Weiner is a CNST Visiting Fellow in the Nanofabrication Research
Group. He is Professeur Èmèrite from the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France.
John received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Chemical Physics. Following
postdoctoral studies and a lectureship at Yale, he joined the faculty at Dartmouth College.
Later, John spent a year as visiting professor at the Laboratoire des Collisions Atomiques
et Moléculaires at Orsay, France, returning to the US to join the faculty at the University
of Maryland, where he investigated atomic collisions at submillikelvin temperatures
achieved by optical cooling techniques. After two decades at Maryland, John returned to
France, where he became interested in light localization by plasmonic structures. At the
CNST, he is working with Henri Lezec on the design, fabrication, and characterization of
nanoscale optical resonator arrays.