Ultrafast quantum photonics enabled by coupling plasmonic nanocavities to strongly radiative antennas
Quantum emitters coupled to plasmonic nanostructures can act as exceptionally bright sources of single photons, operating at room temperature. Plasmonic mode volumes supported by these nanostructures can be several orders of magnitude smaller than the cubic wavelength, which leads to dramatically en...
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Veröffentlicht in: | Optica 2020-05, Vol.7 (5), p.463 |
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Sprache: | eng |
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Zusammenfassung: | Quantum emitters coupled to plasmonic nanostructures can act as
exceptionally bright sources of single photons, operating at room
temperature. Plasmonic mode volumes supported by these nanostructures
can be several orders of magnitude smaller than the cubic wavelength,
which leads to dramatically enhanced light–matter interactions and
drastically increased photon production rates. However, when
increasing the light localization further, these deeply subwavelength
modes may in turn hinder the fast outcoupling of photons into free
space. Plasmonic hybrid nanostructures combining a highly confined
cavity mode and a larger antenna mode circumvent this issue. We
establish the fundamental limits for quantum emission enhancement in
such systems and find that the best performance is achieved when the
cavity and antenna modes differ significantly in size. We
experimentally support this idea by photomodifying a nanopatch antenna
deterministically assembled around a nanodiamond known to contain a
single nitrogen–vacancy (NV) center. As a result, the cavity mode
shrinks, further shortening the NV fluorescence lifetime and
increasing the single-photon brightness. Our analytical and numerical
simulation results provide intuitive insight into the operation of
these emitter–cavity–antenna systems and show that this approach could
lead to single-photon sources with emission rates up to hundreds of
THz and efficiencies close to unity. |
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ISSN: | 2334-2536 2334-2536 |
DOI: | 10.1364/OPTICA.382841 |