Light emission by metals at room temperature is quenched by fast relaxation processes. Nevertheless, Mooradian reported in 1969 the observation of photoluminescence by metals pumped by a laser. While this phenomenon is currently at the heart of many promising applications, it is still poorly understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSemiconductor colloidal nanocrystals are excellent light emitters in terms of efficiency and spectral control. They can be integrated with a metasurface to make ultrathin photoluminescent devices with a reduced amount of active material and perform complex functionalities such as beam shaping or polarization control. To design such a metasurface, a quantitative model of the emitted power is needed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ability to confine THz photons inside deep-subwavelength cavities promises a transformative impact for THz light engineering with metamaterials and for realizing ultrastrong light-matter coupling at the single emitter level. To that end, the most successful approach taken so far has relied on cavity architectures based on metals, for their ability to constrain the spread of electromagnetic fields and tailor geometrically their resonant behavior. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a comparatively high level of confinement by exploiting a plasmonic mechanism based on localized THz surface plasmon modes in bulk semiconductors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDetection of molecules is a key issue for many applications. Surface enhanced infrared absorption (SEIRA) uses arrays of resonant nanoantennas with good quality factors which can be used to locally enhance the illumination of molecules. The technique has proved to be an effective tool to detect small amount of material.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report an experimental and theoretical study of light emission by a patterned ensemble of colloidal quantum dots (cQDs). This system modifies drastically the emission spectrum and polarization as compared to a planar layer of cQDs. It exhibits bright, directional and polarized emission including a degree of circular polarization in some directions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report on the synthesis of hybrid light emitting particles with a diameter ranging between 100 and 500 nm, consisting in a compact semiconductor CdSe/CdS/CdZnS nanocrystal aggregate encapsulated by a controlled nanometric size silica and gold layers. We first characterize the Purcell decay rate enhancement corresponding to the addition of the gold nanoshell as a function of the particle size and find a good agreement with the predictions of numerical simulations. Then, we show that the contribution corresponding to Förster resonance energy transfer is inhibited.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCoupling quantum emitters and nanostructures, in particular cold atoms and optical waveguides, has recently raised a large interest due to unprecedented possibilities of engineering light-matter interactions. In this work, we propose a new type of periodic dielectric waveguide that provides strong interactions between atoms and guided photons with an unusual dispersion. We design an asymmetric comb waveguide that supports a slow mode with a quartic (instead of quadratic) dispersion and an electric field that extends far into the air cladding for an optimal interaction with atoms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIncandescent sources such as hot membranes and globars are widely used for mid-infrared spectroscopic applications. The emission properties of these sources can be tailored by means of resonant metasurfaces: control of the spectrum, polarization, and directivity have been reported. For detection or communication applications, fast temperature modulation is desirable but is still a challenge due to thermal inertia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSurface enhanced infrared absorption (SEIRA) spectroscopy and surface plasmon resonance (SPR) make possible, thanks to plasmonics nanoantennas, the detection of low quantities of biological and chemical materials. Here, we investigate the infrared response of 2,4-dinitrotoluene deposited on various arrays of closely arranged metal-insulator-metal (MIM) resonators and experimentally show how the natural dispersion of the complex refractive index leads to an intertwined combination of SEIRA and SPR effect that can be leveraged to identify molecules. They are shown to be efficient for SEIRA spectroscopy and allows detecting of the dispersive explosive material, 2,4-dinitrotoluene.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe study theoretically the scattering of light by an ensemble of N resonant atoms in a subwavelength volume. We consider the low intensity regime so that each atom responds linearly to the field. While N noninteracting atoms would scatter N^{2} more than a single atom, we find that N interacting atoms scatter less than a single atom near resonance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSurface plasmons polaritons are mixed electronic and electromagnetic waves. They have become a workhorse of nanophotonics because plasmonic modes can be confined in space at the nanometer scale and in time at the 10 fs scale. However, in practice, plasmonic modes are often excited using diffraction-limited beams.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this paper, we present a numerical modal study of a simple slab, made of an uniaxial anisotropic material having an "epsilon-near-zero" (ENZ) dielectric function, surrounded by vacuum. We use two Drude models with a different plasma frequency for the direction parallel and perpendicular to the slab surface as toy models to study the effect of uniaxial anisotropy of type I (∊ > 0, ∊ < 0) and type II (∊ < 0, ∊ > 0) on the different electromagnetic modes of the system. In addition to the so-called ENZ mode, studied in detail by Campione et.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBy measuring the transmission of near-resonant light through an atomic vapor confined in a nanocell we demonstrate a mesoscopic optical response arising from the nonlocality induced by the motion of atoms with a phase coherence length larger than the cell thickness. Whereas conventional dispersion theory-where the local atomic response is simply convolved by the Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution-is unable to reproduce the measured spectra, a model including a nonlocal, size-dependent susceptibility is found to be in excellent agreement with the measurements. This result improves our understanding of light-matter interaction in the mesoscopic regime and has implications for applications where mesoscopic effects may degrade or enhance the performance of miniaturized atomic sensors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwo-boson interference, a fundamentally quantum effect, has been extensively studied with photons through the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect and observed with guided plasmons. Using two freely propagating surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) interfering on a lossy beam splitter, we show that the presence of loss enables us to modify the reflection and transmission factors of the beam splitter, thus revealing quantum interference paths that do not exist in a lossless configuration. We investigate the two-plasmon interference on beam splitters with different sets of reflection and transmission factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe measure the coherent scattering of light by a cloud of laser-cooled atoms with a size comparable to the wavelength of light. By interfering a laser beam tuned near an atomic resonance with the field scattered by the atoms, we observe a resonance with a redshift, a broadening, and a saturation of the extinction for increasing atom numbers. We attribute these features to enhanced light-induced dipole-dipole interactions in a cold, dense atomic ensemble that result in a failure of standard predictions such as the "cooperative Lamb shift".
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLight emission by inelastic tunneling has been known for many years. Recently, this technique has been used to generate surface plasmons using a scanning tunneling microscope tip. The emission process suffers from a very low efficiency lower than a photon in 10^{4} electrons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSurface plasmon polaritons are electromagnetic waves coupled to collective electron oscillations propagating along metal-dielectric interfaces, exhibiting a bosonic character. Recent experiments involving surface plasmons guided by wires or stripes allowed the reproduction of quantum optics effects, such as antibunching with a single surface plasmon state, coalescence with a two-plasmon state, conservation of squeezing, or entanglement through plasmonic channels. We report the first direct demonstration of the wave-particle duality for a single surface plasmon freely propagating along a planar metal-air interface.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFColloidal semiconductor quantum dots are fluorescent nanocrystals exhibiting exceptional optical properties, but their emission intensity strongly depends on their charging state and local environment. This leads to blinking at the single-particle level or even complete fluorescence quenching, and limits the applications of quantum dots as fluorescent particles. Here, we show that a single quantum dot encapsulated in a silica shell coated with a continuous gold nanoshell provides a system with a stable and Poissonian emission at room temperature that is preserved regardless of drastic changes in the local environment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigate highly-doped InAsSb layers lattice matched onto GaSb substrates by angular-dependent reflectance. A resonant dip is evidenced near the plasma frequency of thin layers. Based on Fresnel coefficient in the case of transverse electromagnetic wave, we interpret this resonance as due to the excitation of a leaky electromagnetic mode, the Brewster "mode", propagating in the metallic layer deposited on a dielectric material.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFQuantum emitters such as NV-centers or quantum dots can be used as single-photon sources. To improve their performance, they can be coupled to microcavities or nano-antennas. Plasmonic antennas offer an appealing solution as they can be used with broadband emitters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNitrogen-vacancy (NV) color centers in nanodiamonds are highly promising for bioimaging and sensing. However, resolving individual NV centers within nanodiamond particles and the controlled addressing and readout of their spin state has remained a major challenge. Spatially stochastic super-resolution techniques cannot provide this capability in principle, whereas coordinate-controlled super-resolution imaging methods, like stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, have been predicted to fail in nanodiamonds.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present a new type of electrically tunable strong coupling between planar metamaterials and epsilon-near-zero modes that exist in a doped semiconductor nanolayer. The use of doped semiconductors makes this strong coupling tunable over a wide range of wavelengths through the use of different doping densities. We also modulate this coupling by depleting the doped semiconductor layer electrically.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe demonstrate that confined Tamm plasmon modes can be advantageously exploited for the realization of new kind of metal/semiconductor lasers. Laser emission is demonstrated for Tamm structures with various diameters of the metallic disks which provide the confinement. A reduction of the threshold with the size is observed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report local spectra of the near-field thermal emission recorded by a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer, using a tungsten tip as a local scatterer coupling the near-field thermal emission to the far field. Spectra recorded on silicon carbide and silicon dioxide exhibit temporal coherence due to thermally excited surface waves. Finally, we evaluate the ability of this spectroscopy to probe the frequency dependence of the electromagnetic local density of states.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigate the optical absorption in a thin Cu(In,Ga)Se(2) solar cell with a Lambertian white paint beneath a transparent back contact. Although this configuration has been proposed more than 30 years ago, it turns out that rigorous simulation of Maxwell's equations demand powerful numerical calculations. This type of approach is time consuming and does not provide a physical insight in the absorption mechanisms.
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