Life Beyond Diffraction: Optical Nanospectroscopic Imaging at Length Scales that Matter

In this talk, I will describe a breakthrough solution to the longstanding ¿nanospectroscopy imaging¿ problem, a problem defined by the difficulty of optically probing local material properties in a widely-applicable fashion. Currently, a large number of nano-optical approaches attempt to address this, but always at the expense of sensitivity, bandwidth, resolution, and/or sample types. We designed and applied a simple and general solution, which involves a new nano-optical device concept for efficient broadband coupling between far-field light and nanoplasmonic modes, thereby enabling multidimensional nano-imaging. Specifically, we use this solution to map locally-varying charge recombination in Indium Phosphide (InP) nanowires and the influence of trap states on luminescence processes ¿ yielding important information for InP nanowires that was unobtainable with previous methods.