Eventos
O xoves 17 de setembro de 2026, o Dr. Philippe Roelli (CIC nanoGUNE, San Sebastián, Spain) ofrecerá o seminario "A Nanoparticle, a Mirror, and a Tip: Nanoscale Spectroscopy from IR to VIS" dentro do ciclo CINBIO Seminar Programme.
Será ás 11:00 horas na Sala de Seminarios de Torre CACTI.
ABSTRACT:
Subwavelength nanocavities have emerged as powerful platforms for enhancing and probing light–matter interactions at the nanoscale, enabling spectroscopic access to localized molecular ensembles, down to the level of individual molecules. Despite their strong field confinement, efficiently coupling external illumination into such deeply subwavelength cavities and dynamically controlling their interaction with embedded molecules remain key challenges. In this talk, I introduce a tip-enhanced nanocavity approach that combines a scanning metallic tip with nanoparticle-on-mirror (NPoM) cavities to control electromagnetic field enhancements across the visible (VIS) and infrared (IR) spectral ranges.
I will illustrate how this approach opens new opportunities to probe and control molecular vibrations at the nanoscale through two recent works based on complementary spectroscopic modalities: (i) linear infrared spectroscopy of individual phonon-polariton NPoM cavity resonances using nano-FTIR, and (ii) nonlinear vibrational spectroscopy of molecular monolayers confined in NPoM cavities through continuous-wave IR-to-VIS upconversion.
SHORT BIO:
Philippe Roelli carried out his PhD at EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) in the group of Tobias Kippenberg, with a complementary affiliation at the Max Planck–EPFL Center for Molecular Nanoscience. During his doctoral work he introduced the framework of molecular optomechanics and proposed a scheme for continuous-wave conversion of infrared light into the visible. This research direction was further pursued through the European FET-OPEN project THOR on molecule-enabled terahertz detection.
Supported by Swiss National Science Foundation and Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowships, he then joined the Nano-optics group of Rainer Hillenbrand at CIC nanoGUNE (San Sebastián, Spain), where he developed a dual VIS–IR scanning-probe microscope and introduced tip-enhanced nanocavities. His work combines concepts from quantum optics with nanophotonic design and instrumental development for nanoscale spectroscopy, with a continuing focus on using nanocavities to probe and control molecular and material vibrations across the infrared and visible.
