Jean-Jacques Greffet
13 - 17 July 2025
Marseille Chanot, Palais des Congrès et des Expositions
Marseille, France
Events
Jean-Jacques Greffet
Institut d'Optique
Light Emissions by Solids: A Unified Model
Light emission by electronic excitations of a solid is often described using a list of different microscopic processes such as incandescence, fluorescence, electroluminescence, scintillation, cathodoluminescence, light emission by inelastic tunneling. These processes are associated to electronic transitions but for most of them, no quantitative theories are available. One difficulty is that beyond the microscopic transition responsible for the emission in the bulk, it is necessary to model the extraction of the photon out of the emitter. On the other hand, electrical engineers can compute emission by currents in complex environments such as cavities or antennas which modify drastically the process. We will present in the talk a general framework that reconciles the two points of view and can be used to derive a quantitative model of light emission by solids. Applications to thermal emission and electroluminescence, photoluminescence by metals, laser and photon Bose-Einstein condensation will be discussed.
About the Speaker
Jean-Jacques Greffet is an alumnus of Ecole Normale de Paris-Saclay. He received his PhD in solid-state physics in 1988 from Université Paris-Sud, working in light scattering by rough surfaces. Between 1994 and 2005, he worked on the theory of image formation in near-field optics. Since 1998, he made a number of seminal contributions to the field of thermal radiation at the nanoscale, including the demonstration of coherent thermal sources and the giant radiative heat transfer at the nanoscale due to surface phonon polaritons. Since 2000, he has contributed to the field of quantum plasmonics and light emission with nanoantennas and metasurfaces. He is an OSA fellow and the recipient of the Ixcore Foundation prize and the Servant prize of the French Academy of Science.
