 
Welcome on my blog Nanobeambuilder
 My name is Yikuan Wang. I am an associate professor at Yancheng Teachers Unviersity in the College of Physics and Electrical Engineering. My discipline is physics and basically the courses that I mainly teach are at the introductory college physics level and we try to get STEM students up to the point of understanding mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism and optics, sometimes a little bit of quantum mechanics, which describes everything that happens in their daily life. I also teach math-intensive courses such as Mathematical Physics Methods, Electrodynamics, and Electromagnetic Fields for Engineers etc. Apart from teaching, I also guide students in their thesis. I am amazed passionate students can contribute to the related academic field through writing.
At the University of Massachusetts Amherst I really enjoyed learning to use surface plasmons of metal nanoparticles to enhance the light emission of quantum dots--the super tiny artificial atoms-- which are of fundamental importance. We found that the resonant surface plasmon field of a gold nanoparticle array can set the emission dipole moment in a preferred direction, and thus the interaction between this directional dipole moment and the photon field, as Richard P. Feynman described in his Quantum Electrodynamics, results in our experimental observation of a detection angle dependent photoluminescence dynamics. Therefore our observation, which was first reported at the 2014 American Physical Society March Meeting in Colorado, USA, establishes the role the photon field as the environment plays in the dipole emission. At that time at Amherst I also always cherish the hope to use surface plasmon polaritons to make tiny light beams. In physics, we think we know that light cannot pass through a hole which is of sub-wavelength-width, which means in practice we couldn't make a nano-sized light beam. However, if we find a way to release the surface plasmon polariton photons trapped in the metal-dielectric films, nano-sized laser beams should be feasible. Well that's the way I thought it should work but it took a little bit more effort than that to really understand how to make the nano-sized light happen, but that's what I have done over the years at Yancheng Teachers University to design a general procedure theoretically to make a nano-sized laser beam.
|
|
