Good news!
I was awarded competitive (as hell!) Macquarie University Research Fellowship (MQRF), to continue my work at MQ for the next 3 years! The project I submitted, together with Prof. Michael J. Steel, is focused on developing optoacoustic nanosystems for QAD – quantum acoustodynamics.
More results (hopefully) soon!
In collaboration with Luke Helt, Chris Poulton and Michael Steel we have recently submitted our new manuscript on the elastic analogue of the electromagnetic Purcell factor for review. It has been finally published in Physical Review Letters, and highlighted as an Editors’ Suggestion. You can either read it on the PRL website, or access the arXiv version for free.
In this manuscript we explore a possible
analogue of the familiar electromagnetic concept – modification of the energy dissipation rate from a localized, dipolar source. In our study, the source in given by a localized harmonic force, and the modification of its radiation is governed by an elastic nanoantenna – a small spherical particle positioned near the emitter, and embedded in a different elastic material. We provide a theoretical framework for identifying the quasi-normal modes of the structure, demonstrate the effects in an exemplary system, and discuss the possibility of using this effect for engineering the rates of nonlinear, phonon-mediated optical effects.
Our paper Pulsed Molecular Optomechanics in Plasmonic Nanocavities: From Nonlinear Vibrational Instabilities to Bond-Breaking has just been published in Physical Review X (Open Access)!
It’s a part of our effort to verify the predictions of the optomechanical picture of Raman Scattering from molecules, which was first proposed by researchers from EPFL, and further developed in my former group, headed by Javier Aizpurua in San Sebastian in Basque Country, in collaboration with Geza Giedke and Alejandro Gonzalez-Tudela.
The paper reports and discusses nonlinearities observed in Raman scattering from molecules positioned in well-controlled plasmonic nanosystems, which have been extensively studied by the research groups of Jeremy Baumberg at Cambridge University. While these systems are rather easy to destroy by a strong continuous laser illumination, Anna Lombardi, the lead author of the paper, found that one can instead use picosecond pulses of a much more intense laser source to stimulate the vibrations of the molecules.
Furthermore, she observed that the amount of light scattered off the molecules in the Raman process does not scale linearly with the peak intensity of the lasers! Instead, in accordance with the predictions of the Molecular Optomechanical, the Raman scattering becomes superlinear after a certain threshold.
Our manuscript “Spectral Selectivity of Plasmonic Interactions between Individual Up-Converting Nanocrystals and Spherical Gold Nanoparticles”, describing experimental and theoretical analysis of the effect of plasmonic nanoparticles on two independent relaxation channels of nanocrystals, has been published in MPDI Materials. The experiments were conducted in Optics of Hybrid Nanostructures labs at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland.
Fellow quantum-nano-people! I’ve had a pleasure to contribute to the organization of the Nanoscale Quantum Optics conference/workshop, which will take place in Budapest in late October 2017.
It’s an Early Career Researchers only event, so there will be few PIs dominating the discussions, and hopefully many opportunities to grab a beer (or palinka) with your peers!
Over the last few months, we (me in collaboration with my former group in San Sebastian and Jeremy Baumberg’s group at Cambridge University) have bee
n preparing a contribution for the SERS: Faraday Discussion – a conference organized by the Faraday Division. Its format is unique, as the invited speakers prepare manuscripts a few months in advance, share them among attendees who then have a few months to prepare for a lively and lengthy discussion at the conference. Thus, it’s a perfect venue to hash out the nitty-gritty details of new formalisms or ideas.
We have prepared manuscript entitled Linking classical and molecular optomechanics descriptions of SERS in which, as the title suggests, we attempt to close the gap between the classical formalisms used by the SERS community, and molecular optomechanics introduced by the LQNO group from EPFL and the expanded by us. We compare the two optomechanical formalisms to each other and to experiments, and then show how they can be simplified to the classical framework. We also develop and present classical intuitions to the phenomena leading to non-linearities in Raman scattering, and discuss some (much earlier!) contributions where they’ve been partially predicted.
On January 30, I started my two-year contract at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, in the group of Michael Steel, collaboration with researchers from UTS (University of Technology Sydney) led by Christopher Poulton and from University of Sydney (group of Ben Eggleton).
The exact focus of my project isn’t well defined yet, as we are trying to work out where our research interests and goals overlap. Nevertheless, it seems like I will attempt to apply my (limited) experience in cavity optomechanics to look into the newly developed quantum-mechanical description of SBS – Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in dielectric waveguides. I will soon update the project website and include links to the relevant papers.
I will also be working on applying the classical framework and solving real-life problems (sic!) with the software developed by researchers from UTS and USydney – NumBAT.
Pictures, photos, papers (hopefully!) and blog entries will come soon!
During my stay at Warsaw University I was invited by my host – Prof. Konrad Banaszek (who, BTW is moving to Center of New Technologies and starting a new project Quantum Optical Communication Systems) to give a seminar on the quantum-mechanical elements of my PhD work. Afterwards, I have had the pleasure to give another seminar (invited by Dr. Karolina Slowik who recently moved back to Torun and brought her expertise on the plasmon/quantum optics interface and starting project
High enhancement and Interference of Molecular Transitions) on molecular optomechanics at my alma mater – Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun.
I will post the (better) second presentation here soon – unfortunately, there are still things we haven’t published in there yet.
Also, I’m about to visit Alejandro González-Tudela at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching near Munich, Germany from (17-20 Jan. 2017). We plan to finish a paper on frequency-resolved two-photon correlations in generic optomechanical systems. Fingers crossed!
Our research paper on the beautiful experiment conducted by Jeremy Baumberg’s group in Cambridge University, which uses the novel theoretical formalism proposed by the group of Tobias Kippenberg (“Molecular cavity optomechanics as a theory of plasmon-enhanced Raman scattering”, Nature Nanotech. 11, 164 (2016)) and explored later by our group from San Sebastian (“Quantum mechanical description of Raman scattering from molecules in plasmonic cavities”, ACS Nano 10, 6291 (2016)), was just published in Science (“Single-molecule optomechanics in <<picocavities>>”, Science Vol. 354, Issue 6313, pp. 726-729 (2016))!
The experimental results are pretty stunning and indicate a new, somewhat peculiar mechanism in which single atoms of gold can move around metallic nanostructures to give our vibrational spectroscopy a boost. In this press release, these wandering atoms are called “world’s tiniest magnifying glass”. Seems right!
A couple of days ago I got my hands on “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki. The introduction (all 5 pages!) tells a fascinating story of how Francis Galton found that the mass of a fat ox, displayed at a local country fair, was remarkably well estimated by the average of bets submitted by the crowd of attendees of the fair (which by definition of “a “crowd”, included individuals with knowledge of livestock spanning from extensive to null. And back!) Furthermore, he found that this average was closer to the actual result than any individual bet!
Having read that story, I turned to Facebook to ask my friends to help me estimate whether the future president of the USA will be a donkey or an (orange) elephant. A true zoo of possibilities!
But my soon revised goal was to estimate how well will my estimate – biased by the geography and cultural homogeneity of the participants (majority of bids came from my facebook friends; there were very few shares and only 1 vote from an individual outside my friends list – hey Maren!) – compares with those conducted with thousand of votes, primarily residing in the USA.
The actual question, and the assisting disclaimers can be found near the end of this post.
Results
I plot the results below. Since overall Hillary Clinton won the poll, I show the ratio of bids favoring her (poll-winner bids) to the total number of bids (total bids).
As the votes were coming in, every few hours I would note the votes to see if tendencies are changing (note the slight uptick in the last hours – I closed to loop after voting in the USA has been going on for a few hours already; might be a coincidence though).
So, the blue line is a guide, but points represent the actual ratios measured at irregular time intervals. Orange line represents the final ratio of bids from Poland (11-8 for HC), red – final ratio of bids from Spain. The green area depicts highest and lowest betdata probability score from the BETDATA website taken over the last 2 days.
I chose to plot results from Poland and Spain, as these were the countries most frequently listed as residences – 19 (11H, 8T) and 5 (4H, 1T) times, respectively.
The remaining countries of residence were: Germany (4H, 0T), UK (3H, 1T), Netherlands, USA and Switzerland (all 2H, 0T), Austria, India, Israel, Egypt and South Africa (all 1H, 0T) and finally Denmark and Australia (both 0H, 1T).
Interpretation? Observations?
“Data! Data! Data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.”
Sherlock Holmes
There’s actually to little data to come to any sensible conclusions. The trend is there, but… I don’t know. I was actually hoping to find that the “crowd” residing in Poland would provide identical estimate as the large polls. Well… you proved me wrong!
Interestingly enough, (the few) Spaniards were much closer.
Another point is that, while I stressed that this is not a popularity poll, some people did express their grief over the projected outcome. Among those residing in Poland, it was 3 bids for Trump assisted by grief, and 1 bid for Hillary, where Dorota (hej Dorota!) wrote “We all lose”. Hardly a cheer, right? So, perhaps it’s just that Poles are naturally more pessimistic? With this weather, can’t blame them… USA!
In a recent poll conducted in Poland, Hillary got around 60% of votes, whereas Trump got 6%. Mind you, this was a popularity vote, not a prediction of the outcome.
Actual results
I will update this post once the official results are in… in December 😉 Not that it matters really (the update, the actual results do matter, I would have that orange, thin-skinned sexist to take us back to the stone age because he didn’t bother to listen people that actually know how stuff works, when it works and why his GREAT ideas won’t work).
The original facebook post:
Dear Friends, Drodzy Przyjaciele, Estimados Amigos,
I’m running a small-scale version of Francis Galton’s test, and I need you to answer the following question:
Who do you think will win the coming presidential elections in USA?
(y) [comment: this stands for the iconic fb “like”] for Hillary
for Trump (sorry, that’s the supposed to be the smiley face – any of them really)
The idea is that if I assemble a bit enough group of people, with the usual distribution of knowledge of politics (with few experts and the majority of casual voters), I should be able to predict the results of the elections better than the polls. It doesn’t matter if you have little idea about the subject – your vote may actually matter more!
And, as per usual – please share and vote!
Few disclaimers:
(i) this is not a poll of political preferences – the question is not “who would you like to win” nor “who should win”; as my sister pointed out accurately, it’s difficult to separate your informed guess from a political bias – to handle that issue, think of it as a casino gamble, where you have to bet $10000 on either candidate. No responsibility or pressure really😉
(ii) If you don’t mind, please share your choice and your country of residence in the comments. I may use it for some more advanced analysis later. Again – it’s not about you declaring your bias! Just how accurate of a guess you can make.
(iii) I’m taking the liberty of marking a lot of my friends here – I need to get as many votes as possible, and it turns out I’m not as popular as I though I was…
(iv) I do know that there are many other polls like these. But this one is mine. Special. Like that little cactus I barely keep alive in my apartment. And I won’t compare it to all the other cactuses (cacti?!) until it blooms!
From the mid-September, until mid-December I will be working at the
Faculty of Physics of the Warsaw University… in Warsaw, Poland. I have been granted a Short Term Scientific Mission scholarship from the COST Action MP1043 “Nanoscale Quantum Optics”.
During my stay here I will be working with the local Quantum Optics and Information community, in particular with Prof. Konrad Banaszek, who is my formal host, and as many people from the Division of Optics as will show sufficient patience to tolerate me in their labs.
I will be also collaborating with Dr. Tomasz Antosiewicz from the Centre of New Technologies on a top-secret breakthrough project. More details (hopefull) soon!
From 4.09 to 9.09.2016 I’m in Groningen (prononced [ˈɣroːnɪŋə(n)], but you can get away with ‘Hroningen’), Netherlands, attending the EPS Condensed 
Matter Division conference. I will present the oral contribution on the optomechanical model for the description of Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy #SERS. I will post the .pdf with the presentation soon after the conference.
While I don’t have the expertise necessary to appreciate most talks (btw. what happened to the tradition of repetitive introductory slides for the non-experts in the seminar room?!), I was lucky to see numerous talks related to optics and Casimir effect:
1 – Tim Hugo Taminiau from TUDelft gave a great talk on the memory systems in diamonds that can be used to repeatedly transmit information between remote quantum systems,
2 – Martin Siles from University Oldenburg talked about the coherent spatial modulation spectroscopy of single metallic nanoparticles. He show that how the precise temporal control of the coherent light scattered from the particles can be used for very sensitive spectro- and microscopy. Brilliant and very elegant!
3 – There was also a session on the Casimir forces. Ricardo Decca introduced his own work on the very fundamental question – in the calculations of Casimir forces, which necessarily include integrals over ALL frequencies, which model of the dielectric function of metal to use in the small frequencies limit? Seems trivial, right? I also learned from Rene Sedmik that there’s a free software scuff-EM for calculating the Casimir forces for arbitrary systems.
What fun! 🙂
Mikołaj K. Schmidt 