Welcome to the website of the NAM !

I am delighted to welcome you to the Nanophotonics and Metrology Laboratory (NAM) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL).

The main focus of our research is nanophotonics: the study of the interaction of light with structures smaller than the wavelength, with special emphasis on plasmonics: the optics of metallic nanostructures. We try to pursue a broad research that includes modelling, nanofabrication and optical characterization. Applications of our work include optical signal processing, biosensors, and novel optical metamaterials. We have also some activities in optical full-field measurement methods, such as speckle and holography interferometry.

Please check our news and publications pages for recent research results.

The Laboratory contributes to several teaching programs at EPFL including photonics, electrical engineering, micro-engineering; and offers a broad variety of lectures and student projects.

I do hope that you will find interesting and useful material on this site, please do not hesitate to give us your feedback.

Olivier J.F. Martin

Latest news:

Binary plasmonic nanosystems

In a collaboration with Prof. Gu in the group of Prof. Gong at Peking University, we investigate numerically binary plasmonic systems composed of two different metals.

As a matter of fact, most plasmonic systems investigated so far are made from single material and the interplay between two plasmonic metals produces extremely interesting effects which have not yet been fully investigated.

In this work, by introducing the difference permittivity ratio η between both metals, the Green's matrix method is used to reveal the different modes in the coupled system. Based on the near field interaction, the interplay of plasmon resonances in both metals leads to a very complex behavior. At a fixed wavelength, varying η leads to different regimes and the system explores four different resonances regions: the dielectric effect region, the resonance chaos region, the collective resonance region, the resonance flat region, as well as new branches region. Simultaneously, avoiding crossing and mode transfer phenomena between the resonance branches are observed. These findings will be helpful to design hybrid plasmonic subwavelength structures. more...