Introduction

Our research focuses on fabricating optical nano-antennas and studying their interaction with single photon emitters including effects of near field excitation and emission directionality. In particular, we exploit the DNA origami technique to rationally organize metallic nanoparticles (NPs) and (bio)-molecules in well-defined geometries and stoichiometry, forming zillions of nano-antennas in parallel. This provides a playground to place optical nanocomponents with nanometer precision, permitting us to study fundamental interactions as well as developing applications in field such as sensing and super-resolution microscopy. We use various optical techniques such as fluorescence time-resolved confocal and widefield microscopies together with dark-field.