Maiken H Mikkelsen

Maiken Sophia Høgh Mikkelsen is a physicist. In 2017, she received the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award from the American Physical Society for her work in quantum nanophotonics. She holds the James N. and Elizabeth H. Barton Associate Professorship in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, where she is also an associate professor of physics and teaches ECE 891: internship and ECE 524: introduction to solid state physics. Her research interests include optoelectronics, nanophotonics, and their applications to human health and the environment. She did a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley before joining the faculty at Duke University in 2012.

List of awards and honors

MURI Award (PI), AFOSR (2021) Stansell Family Distinguished Research Award, Duke University (2021) American Chemical Society (ACS) Photonics Young Investigator Award (2020) Moore Inventor Fellow Award, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (2019) National Institutes of Health (NIH) RO1 Award (2019) Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, American Physical Society (2017) Early Career Achievement Award, SPIE (International Society for Optics and Photonics) (2017) Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award, Office of Naval Research (2017) Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award, Army Research Office (2016) Cottrell Scholar Award, Research Corporation for Science Advancement (2016) Scialog Fellow, Research Corporation for Science Advancement (2016) CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (2015) Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award, Air Force Office of Scientific Research (2015) European Physical Society Ph.D. Thesis prize, Quantum Electronics and Optics (2011) Nature Communications 6, 7788 (2015) ).

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 (Nano Letters 16, 270 (2016) ).

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 (Nature Materials 19, 158 (2020) ).

Created novel multi-scale fabrication technique to realize large-area structural color. Utilized chemical self-assembly to achieve sub-10 nm gaps between metals demonstrating spectrally selective perfect absorbers. Combined this with top-down large-scale patterning to realize multispectral pixels and approximately 10,000 plasmonic combinatorial colors. This work shows promise for breakthroughs in photodetectors and imaging devices (Advanced Materials 27, 8028 (2015) , Advanced Materials 29, 1602971 (2017) ).

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 (BNP). (Nano Letters 20, 4330 (2020) , Advanced Materials 35, 2107986 (2023) ).

Publications Her most cited publications are: (cited 1118 times according to Google Scholar (cited 376 times according to Google Scholar) (cited 498 times according to Google Scholar) (cited 463 times according to Google Scholar) (cited 488 times according to Google Scholar)