He has successfully presented and defended his doctoral Thesis, “Gain and plasmonic coupling of colloidal quantum dots”. Joachim Krenn (supervisor), the team of the Nanooptics Group and the members of the Department of Experimental Physics wish Martin all the best for his future!
Martin’s work has focused on optical gain and lasing from semiconducting nanoparticles. While such “quantum dots” have appealing properties as tunable emission wavelengths, high stability and solution processability, gain is usually difficult to achieve. This is due to non-radiative exciton relaxation in conventional quantum dots due to so-called Auger recombination. Martin’s approach was to use platelet-shaped quantum dots that indeed showed strongly suppressed Auger rates and enabled to achieve high optical gain values, beating the best documented values so far by 250%. Furthermore, Martin realized efficient waveguide structures integrating the quantum dots and coupled them to plasmon modes in lithographically tailored hybrid nanostructures.
