Please forward to your groups and post in your area ______________________________________ Center for Excitonics Seminar Series Announcement Tuesday, March 8, 2011 3:00 PM RLE Conference Room: 36-428 Vinod M Menon, Queens College of CUNY "CONTROL OF LIGHT-MATTER INTERACTION USING DISPERSION ENGINEERED PHOTONIC STRUCTURES" Abstract: Coherent interaction of an ensemble of dipole active atoms or excitons with vacuum electromagnetic field has been studied extensively since its initial conception by Dicke in 1954. However, when the emitters are not only periodically arranged, but are also placed in a periodically modulated dielectric environment, the interaction between them is carried by the electromagnetic Bloch waves of the photonic crystal. This coherent interaction results in the formation of strongly coupled light-matter quasiparticles called Bloch polaritons. In this talk I will discuss our recent work demonstrating the formation of such quasiparticles in a periodically arranged multiple quantum well system. Tuning of these polariton states using electric field and its application for switching and slow light enhanced nonlinear optics will also be discussed. Following this I will discuss our recent work on dispersion engineered metamaterials for controlling the spontaneous emission rate of quantum dots. Unlike microcavity structures that rely on localization of electromagnetic field for increase in the photon density of states, the present work exploits the flat dispersion in anisotropic materials to create more states for the emitter to emit through. Finally I will briefly discuss our work on nonreciprocal optical elements realized using quasiperiodic photonic crystals embedded with colloidal quantum dots. Bio: Dr. Vinod. M. Menon is an Associate Professor of Physics at Queens College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He joined CUNY as part of the Photonic Initiative in 2004. Prior to joining CUNY he was a research staff member at Princeton University (2003-04). He joined Princeton as the Lucent Bell Labs Post Doctoral Fellow in Photonics in 2001. He received his MSc in Physics from the University of Hyderabad, India in 1995 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Massachusetts in 2001. His current research interests include the development of classical and non-classical light sources using quantum dots, metamaterials for controlling light-matter interaction, and engineered nonlinear optical materials using hybrid nanocomposites.