The plasmon hybridization concept shows that plasmons in complex nanostructures interact and hybridize in an analogous manner as atomic orbitals in molecules [1]. This insight provides a foundation for design of new plasmonic structures for enhanced spectroscopies and chemical sensing [2], subwavelength waveguiding [3], photodetectors [4], photocatalysts [5], and other light harvesting applications [6]. The talk is comprised of basic overview material for a general audience interspersed with a few more specialized "hot topics" such as quantum plasmonics, nonlinear optics, water purification and photocatalysis.

[1]  H. Wang et al., Acc. Chem. Res. 40(2007)53
[2]  N.J. Halas et al., Chem. Rev. 111(2011)3913
[3]  S. Lal et al., Acc. Chem. Res. 45(2012)1887
[4]  M. W. Knight et al., Science 332(2011)702
[5]  L. Zhou et al., Science 362(2018)69
[6]  P.D. Dongare et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 116(2019)13182

Prof. Peter Nordlander (http://nordlander.rice.edu) obtained his PhD at Chalmers 1985. After visiting positions at IBM, Bell Laboratories and Rutgers, he joined Rice University 1989 and is Wiess Chair of Natural Sciences and Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Materials Science and Nanoengineering. He has been Visiting Professor at University of Paris, at IOP/CAS, a C.N. Yang Professor at the CUHK, and at Peking University. He is currently a Prominent Overseas Visiting Professor at Wuhan University. His current research concerns the theoretical and computational modeling of Nanophotonics. He is an associate editor of ACS Nano. He is a fellow of APS, AAAS, SPIE, OSA, and MRS and the recipient of the 1999 Charles Duncan Award, the 2013 Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics, the 2014 Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids, the 2015 R. W. Wood Prize for Optics, and the 2019 Hershel M. Rich Invention Award. He has published more than 350 articles, given more than 400 invited presentations, has been cited more than 45,000 times with a Web of Science h-index above 100, and has been a Thomson-Reuters Highly Cited Researcher in Physics and Chemistry since 2013.