Shima Rajabali wins Hans-Eggenberger-Prize
For her doctoral thesis on Ultrastrong light-matter interaction at the nanoscale, Shima Rajabali, receives the Hans-Eggenberger-Prize. The thesis was done at Quantum Optoelectronics lab of the Professors Jérôme Faist and Giacomo Scalari at the Department of Physics of ETH Zurich.
During her doctoral studies, Shima Rajabali and her colleagues at Quantum Optoelectronics lab discovered a physical limit to arbitrarily increasing the coupling strength by subwavelength confinement of the electromagnetic field. The result was published in Nature Photonics together with the theoretical study of polaritonic nonlocal effects done in a collaboration with Professor Simone De Liberato’s group at the University of Southampton; see “Exploring the limits of light–matter coupling at the nanoscale” below.
In another project during her PhD thesis, to investigate the light-matter coupling properties at the limit of a single subwavelength emitter, Shima Rajabali and her colleagues developed a confocal system for resolving the far-field transmission of a single subwavelength ultra-strongly coupled meta-atom, reported in Nature Communications.
Marko Bjelonic from the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich also received the Hans Eggenberger Prize 2022 for his doctoral thesis. Both winners received a prize money of CHF 5000 each.
Currently, Shima Rajabali is a postdoctoral researcher at the Hybrid photonics laboratory at EPFL, working on “Lithium Niobate-based on-chip spectroscopy” at professor Cristina Benea-Chelmus’s research group.