Work package 4 develops advanced nanofabrication technology as well as the imaging methodology required for characterization of EDC structures.
Most applications of EDC structures ultimately rely on the interaction of light with active material, but scaling down the characteristic feature size of nanostructures to the order of 10 nanometer and precisely positioning undamaged active material in the hot-spot is an extremely challenging task. We shall pursue this ambitious goal by various means, including the use of template-assisted selective epitaxy in combination with our buried-heterostructure technology.
In order to characterize the EDC structures manufactured by the consortium, we plan to combine scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy and electron energy-loss spectroscopy to characterize the EDC modes with unprecedented spatial resolution. In this way, the fabrication limits to EDC structures shall be investigated and the smallest length scale of localization that can be obtained in practice shall be established.