The doctoral dissertation in the field of Photonics will be examined at the Faculty of Science and Forestry on the Joensuu Campus and streamed live.
What is the topic of your doctoral research?
My doctoral research is on light and matter interactions on plasmonic platforms. The interaction of light and matter on its own is already important as without it we have no means of appreciating our universe. The focus of these interactions on plasmonic platforms brings another degree of freedom in controlling and exploiting it for everyday needs.
What are the key findings or observations of your doctoral research?
One of the challenges in Raman spectroscopy is that the signal from Raman active molecules, on their own, are weak. This work shows that the weak signals can be independently enhanced by using a specific type of plasmonic platform.
Additionally, while plasmonics lasers have been demonstrated, however, there is little information on how to compare their performance to other matured lasers. Part of the work fills in this gap.
Lastly, researchers are always looking for ways to increase the information-carrying capacity of existing devices or how to efficiently couple light from one device to another. The generation of light beams from a plasmonic platform with no intensity at the centre, as part of this work, might increase the amount of useful light when injecting into a ring-core fibre, for example, and makes the integration of such lights in photonic integrated circuits closer to reality.
Please describe the process of your doctoral research.
Typically, research in this area consists of, after defining the research problem, numerical simulations, fabricating your structures, and characterizations of these structures, and optimizations. My focus has been on fabrication under cleanroom conditions and characterization with high-end optical techniques.
How can the results of your doctoral research be utilised in practice?
As indicated in the outlook section of the thesis, I believe there are already some practical ways that could be considered immediately.
Please describe the process of your doctoral research.
Typically, research in this area consists of, after defining the research problem, numerical simulations, fabricating your structures, and characterizations of these structures, and optimizations. My focus has been on the fabrication under cleanroom conditions and characterization with high-end optical techniques. There are still a lot of unanswered questions waiting to be probed.
The doctoral dissertation of Benjamin O. Asamoah, MSc, entitled Light and matter interactions on plasmonic platforms, will be examined at the Faculty of Science and Forestry on the Joensuu Campus, Metria, M100, on 20 December at 12 noon. The opponent will be Professor, Dr. Frank Wyrowski, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, and the custos will be Professor Jari Turunen, University of Eastern Finland. Language of the public defence is English.
For further information, please contact:
Benjamin O. Asamoah, benjamin.asamoah (a) uef.fi
Dissertation book online http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-61-4391-0
