Broadband Purcell effect: Radiative decay engineering with metamaterials

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Abstract

Engineering the photonic density of states (PDOS) using resonant microcavities or periodic dielectric media gives control over a plethora of classical and quantum phenomena associated with light. Here, we show that nanostructured metamaterials with hyperbolic dispersion, possess a broad bandwidth singularity in the PDOS, an effect not present in any other photonic system, which allows remarkable control over light-matter interactions. A spectacular manifestation of this non-resonant PDOS alteration is the broadband Purcell effect, an enhancement in the spontaneous emission of a light source, which ultimately leads to a device that can efficiently harness a single photon from an isolated emitter. Our approach differs from conventional resonant Purcell effect routes to single photon sources with a limitation in bandwidth, which places restrictions on the probable use of such methods for practical device applications, especially at room temperature. The proposed metadevice, useful for applications from quantum communications to biosensing also opens up the possibility of using metamaterials to probe the quantum electrodynamic properties of atoms and artificial atoms such as quantum dots.

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Plasmon lasers at deep subwavelength scale.

Rupert Oulton, Volker Sorger, Thomas Zentgraf … (2009)

Laser science has been successful in producing increasingly high-powered, faster and smaller coherent light sources. Examples of recent advances are microscopic lasers that can reach the diffraction limit, based on photonic crystals, metal-clad cavities and nanowires. However, such lasers are restricted, both in optical mode size and physical device dimension, to being larger than half the wavelength of the optical field, and it remains a key fundamental challenge to realize ultracompact lasers that can directly generate coherent optical fields at the nanometre scale, far beyond the diffraction limit. A way of addressing this issue is to make use of surface plasmons, which are capable of tightly localizing light, but so far ohmic losses at optical frequencies have inhibited the realization of truly nanometre-scale lasers based on such approaches. A recent theoretical work predicted that such losses could be significantly reduced while maintaining ultrasmall modes in a hybrid plasmonic waveguide. Here we report the experimental demonstration of nanometre-scale plasmonic lasers, generating optical modes a hundred times smaller than the diffraction limit. We realize such lasers using a hybrid plasmonic waveguide consisting of a high-gain cadmium sulphide semiconductor nanowire, separated from a silver surface by a 5-nm-thick insulating gap. Direct measurements of the emission lifetime reveal a broad-band enhancement of the nanowire's exciton spontaneous emission rate by up to six times owing to the strong mode confinement and the signature of apparently threshold-less lasing. Because plasmonic modes have no cutoff, we are able to demonstrate downscaling of the lateral dimensions of both the device and the optical mode. Plasmonic lasers thus offer the possibility of exploring extreme interactions between light and matter, opening up new avenues in the fields of active photonic circuits, bio-sensing and quantum information technology.

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Generation of single optical plasmons in metallic nanowires coupled to quantum dots.

A. V. Akimov, A. Mukherjee, C. L. Yu … (2007)

Control over the interaction between single photons and individual optical emitters is an outstanding problem in quantum science and engineering. It is of interest for ultimate control over light quanta, as well as for potential applications such as efficient photon collection, single-photon switching and transistors, and long-range optical coupling of quantum bits. Recently, substantial advances have been made towards these goals, based on modifying photon fields around an emitter using high-finesse optical cavities. Here we demonstrate a cavity-free, broadband approach for engineering photon-emitter interactions via subwavelength confinement of optical fields near metallic nanostructures. When a single CdSe quantum dot is optically excited in close proximity to a silver nanowire, emission from the quantum dot couples directly to guided surface plasmons in the nanowire, causing the wire's ends to light up. Non-classical photon correlations between the emission from the quantum dot and the ends of the nanowire demonstrate that the latter stems from the generation of single, quantized plasmons. Results from a large number of devices show that efficient coupling is accompanied by more than 2.5-fold enhancement of the quantum dot spontaneous emission, in good agreement with theoretical predictions.