On June 16, 2017, Professor John Sipe, from the University of Toronto, gave a seminar titled “surface plasmons, waveguide modes and Bloch surface waves: the view from a common framework for planar resonant structures”.

John Sipe is a professor in the department of physics at the university of Toronto, and he is a fellow of the American physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the Royal Society of Canada.

His current research focused on optical properties of ring resonators and other artificially structured materials and their use in quantum and nonlinear optics; coherent control and transport of carriers, spins, currents in bulk and nanostructure semiconductors; applications of structures with optical resonances to problems in bio-sensing; the calculation of linear and nonlinear optical properties of novel materials; foundational problems in quantum mechanics.

During the seminar, Prof. John Sipe fist explained how the poles of the Fresnel coefficients of an optical structure are associated with excitations bounded to interfaces, and furthermore pointed out the strategy of using the pole expansion method to explore the physical phenomena in surface plasmons, waveguide modes, Bloch surface waves and a host of other resonant optical structures confined in multilayer structures. Then he gave a clear physical picture of the enhancement processes such as the fluorescence and Raman scattering of optical dipoles (atoms and molecules) or nanostructures near the interface, ad pointed out that such pole expansion method could provide a framework for comparing the effectiveness of enhancing light matter interaction by different optical modes. Lastly, he also showed some potential applications from such pole expansion strategy in optics.

The audience included students and professors from different department of CIOMP, They were interested in his talk, and took part in the discussions with Prof. John Sipe, who answered every question patiently and gave valuable references.

Prof. John Sipe gave a talk (Photo by CIOMP)

Prof. John Sipe dicussed with CIOMP stuff (Photo by CIOMP)