NER: Nanofabricated Optical Devices Based On Single Photon Tunneling

这一建议是响应纳米科学和工程倡议，NSF 01-157，类别NER。 最近，在我们对覆盖有一层聚丁二炔的厚金膜中的单个亚波长针孔的光隧穿测量中，获得了单光子隧穿效应的强有力证据，这是单电子隧穿的直接模拟。由于聚丁二炔的光学非线性，在每秒几千个光子的极低光强下，某些针孔的透射率达到饱和。这一结果已在理论上解释的“光子阻塞”，类似于库仑阻塞现象中观察到的单电子隧穿实验。单光子隧道效应可能在量子通信和信息处理等新兴领域找到许多应用。迄今为止报道的实验已经进行了随机针孔，自然存在于薄金属膜。在受控条件下产生这种效应所需的针孔的形状和尺寸没有详细的知识，这严重限制了该效应的理论描述及其可能的应用的进展。我们建议扩展这些实验，研究单光子隧道效应在良好控制的几何形状，通过使用离子束铣削制造技术。基于这项研究，我们将在光通信和量子光学领域探索一些新的器件想法。

This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NER. Strong evidence of a single-photon tunneling effect, a direct analog of single-electron tunneling, has been obtained recently in our measurements of light tunneling through individual subwavelength pinholes in a thick gold film covered with a layer of polydiacetylene. The transmission of some pinholes reached saturation because of the optical nonlinearity of polydiacetylene at a very low light intensity of a few thousands photons per second. This result has been explained theoretically in terms of "photon blockade", similar to the Coulomb blockade phenomenon observed in single-electron tunneling experiments. The single-photon tunneling effect may find many applications in the emerging fields of quantum communication and information processing. The experiments reported so far have been performed for random pinholes that are naturally present in thin metal films. There is no detailed knowledge on the shape and size of the pinholes necessary to produce this effect under controlled conditions, which severely limits advancement of the theoretical description of the effect and its possible applications. We propose to expand these experiments to study single-photon tunneling effect in well-controlled geometries, by making use of ion-beam milling fabrication techniques. Based on this research we are going to explore a number of novel device ideas in the areas of optical communications and quantum optics.