Faculty Recruiting Seminar - Feng Pan

Photonic structures sculpt light by controlling phase, polarization, amplitude, and confinement at subwavelength scales, significantly enhancing light-matter interactions. This control drives advances in super-resolution microscopy, single-molecule measurements, single-photon nonlinearity, and polariton chemistry. This seminar explores how nano- and micro-cavities temporally and/or spatially concentrate light to amplify these interactions. I will first discuss ultrahigh-quality-factor microcavity-based spectrometers probing plasmonic-photonic interactions across a wide range of energy scales and microfluidic cavities tailoring these dynamics. In the second part, I will present high-quality-factor chiral metasurfaces—arrays of Si chiral meta-atoms—that enable room-temperature valley-selective emission in atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenides.

Short bio: Feng Pan is a postdoctoral scholar working with Prof. Jennifer Dionne at Stanford University. His current research focuses on solid-state, scalable spin-photon interfaces for classical and quantum information systems. He earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the guidance of Prof. Randall Goldsmith. His doctoral research, which explored plasmonic-photonic hybrid systems using ultrahigh-quality-factor microcavity-based spectrometers, earned him the K.V. and Sara Reddy Award in Physical Chemistry. Additionally, his dedication to science outreach was recognized with the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy Award for effectively communicating his Ph.D. research to the public.