Sophie Meuret

Sophie Meuret is a Post-Doc in the Photonic Materials group at AMOLF, Amsterdam. She obtained her PhD from the University Paris Saclay.  Her work mostly focuses on the understanding of electron-matter interaction using cathodoluminescence (CL) spectroscopy. CL is the light emitted by a material after interaction with a high-energy electron; collecting this light allows the study of the optical properties of nanostructures at the nanometer scale.

In the Photonic Material group, she is currently developing ultra-fast time-resolved cathodoluminescence (CL) spectroscopy to study spatially-resolved ultrafast carrier recombination and single emitters in nanostructures. Investigating the CL light in a time-resolved manner gives access to dynamic properties of charge carriers at the nanometer and picosecond scale. She developed an experiment using an ultrafast beam blanker in the electron column to create 30 ps electron pulses, enabling to perform lifetime mapping with a resolution of 40 nm.

In parallel, she is developing, together with Magda Solà Garcia (PhD), a time-resolved microscope based on a pulsed-laser driven electron gun. Electron pulses are generated by photoemission when the laser is exciting the tip of the electron microscope. This experiment should allow the generation of sub-picosecond electron pulses and a spatial resolution of 5 nm and will enable pump-probe CL spectroscopy on a wide range of nanophotonic structures.

Using an Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment, she also studied the CL autocorrelation function g(2) from InGaN/GaN quantum wells. The g(2) shows strong bunching due to the fact that a single electron creates multiple excitations. They proved that this effect can be used to extract the excitation efficiency without a priori knowledge of the structure.