Metasurfaces are artificial structures that enable flat optical components and pave the way for on-chip light processing. A promising route to new functionalities is to build metasurfaces out of materials with strong optical resonances. Light then propagates across the metasurface in the form of polaritons – mixed light-matter particles. This recently enabled coherent thermal light sources and directional waveguiding. So far, it has been challenging to characterize metasurfaces because of their small sub-wavelength building blocks, their overall large spatial extent, and their wavelength-dependent [more...]

The European Research Council has awarded Melanie Müller an ERC Starting Grant for her project FASTOMIC. With a total amount of €1.5 million for a period of five years, this grant will allow her and her team to push the limits of ultrafast scanning tunneling microscopy to study the emergence and dynamics of nonequilibrium quantum states in real time and space. The project entitled “Ultrafast atomic-scale imaging and control of nonequilibrium phenomena in quantum materials” is [more...]