Maiken Mikkelsen


Maiken Sophia Høgh Mikkelsen is a physicist who won the Maria Goeppert Mayer award from the American Physical Society in 2017 for her work in quantum nanophotonics. She is currently the James N. and Elizabeth H. Barton Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and an associate professor of physics at Duke University where she teaches ECE 891: internship and ECE 524: introduction to solid state physics. Mikkelsen is credited for many advancements in optoelectronics, nanophotonics, human health and the environment.

Education

Maiken Mikkelsen received her B.S. in physics in 2004 from the University of Copenhagen. She received her Ph.D. in physics in 2009 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studied single electron spin dynamics in semiconductors for her Ph.D. thesis and for which she won the 2011 Thesis Prize from the Quantum Electronics and Optical Division of the European Physical Society. She did a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley before joining the faculty at Duke University in 2012.

Research interests

Mikkelsen's research focuses on light-matter interactions in nanophotonic structures, quantum materials, and novel multi-scale fabrication techniques. Her recent work in "Extreme Nanophotonics" aims to realize unprecedented material properties and behavior by sculpting electromagnetic fields on the molecular scale.

List of awards and honors

Major scientific achievements

Revealed record-high spontaneous emission rates. Elucidated the mechanisms behind large Purcell factors and demonstrated record-high 1,000-fold enhancement in the spontaneous emission rate of dye molecules and semiconductor quantum dots ', 6, 7788.
Realized first ultrafast and efficient single photon source. Realized this long-sought goal by embedding single quantum dots in plasmonic cavities. Critical to quantum information and quantum optics communities, as the natural slow emission rate of single photon sources is a limiting factor for many experiments and future applications .
Demonstrated first ultrafast, spectrally-selective thermal photodetector. Utilized metasurfaces to create spectrally-selective perfect absorption enabling the use of an only 100 nm pyroelectric thermal detection layer and revealing speeds of <700 ps, an improvement of five-orders-of-magnitude over state-of-the-art. The metasurface also acts as an on-chip spectral filter promising for hyperspectral imaging .
Created novel multi-scale fabrication technique to realize large-area structural color. Utilized chemical self-assembly to achieve sub-10 nm gaps between metals to demonstrate spectrally-selective perfect absorbers. Combined with top-down large-scale patterning to realize multi-spectral pixels and ~10,000 plasmonic combinatorial colors. Promising for transformative breakthroughs of e.g. photodetectors and imaging devices ', 29, 1602971.
Explained the benefit of nanogap cavities for point-of-care immunoassays.' Integrated a sandwich immunoassay microarray within a plasmonic nanogap cavity resulting in a 151-fold increase in fluorescence and 14-fold improvement in the limit-of-detection for the cardiac biomarker B-type natriuretic peptide. ', 35, 2107986 ''.

Publications

Her most cited publications are:
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