Brownian Motion Governs the Plasmonic Enhancement of Colloidal Upconverting Nanoparticles.

Upconverting nanoparticles are essential in modern photonics due to their ability to convert infrared light to visible light. Despite their significance, they exhibit limited brightness, a key drawback that can be addressed by combining them with plasmonic nanoparticles. Plasmon-enhanced upconversion has been widely demonstrated in dry environments, where upconverting nanoparticles are immobilized, but constitutes a challenge in liquid media where Brownian motion competes against immobilization.

Electroluminescence as a Probe of Strong Exciton-Plasmon Coupling in Few-Layer WSe.

The manipulation of coupled quantum excitations is of fundamental importance in realizing novel photonic and optoelectronic devices. We use electroluminescence to probe plasmon-exciton coupling in hybrid structures consisting of a nanoscale plasmonic tunnel junction and few-layer two-dimensional transition-metal dichalcogenide transferred onto the junction. The resulting hybrid states act as a novel dielectric environment that affects the radiative recombination of hot carriers in the plasmonic nanostructure.

Inverse-designed dielectric cloaks for entanglement generation.

We investigate the generation of entanglement between two quantum emitters through the inverse-design engineering of their photonic environment. By means of a topology-optimization approach acting at the level of the electromagnetic Dyadic Green's function, we generate dielectric cloaks operating at different inter-emitter distances and incoherent pumping strengths. We show that the structures obtained maximize the dissipative coupling between the emitters under extremely different Purcell factor conditions, and yield steady-state concurrence values much larger than those attainable in free space.