Collaborative Research: Cavity-Enhanced Exciton Emission from Carbon Nanotubes in the Intrinsic Regime

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Nontechnical Description: This collaborative project between Stevens Institute of Technology and Columbia University seeks to understand and control the interaction of light with crystalline matter in nanoscale photonic structures. The research includes material growth of crystalline wires that are only one nanometer in diameter and several micrometers long. These so-called nanowires are then integrated with photonic nanostructures that strongly enhance their light emission. A particular focus is on the fundamental understanding of how electric charges interact with heat and light in these nanoscale structures. Ultimately, this research project enables an efficiency and performance boost for chip-scale light sources and detectors, in particular quantum-light sources that are needed to realize quantum-communication technologies to support, for example, national security. The principal investigators collaborate to introduce new research-based educational materials into the graduate curricula on both campuses by team-teaching these subjects via video link. This project offers research experience to graduate and undergraduate students. Outreach activities at Stevens leverage institutional programs such as the Women in Engineering Program. At Columbia, the co-principal investigator develops an outreach model that builds a close partnership with teachers at the Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science, and Engineering, a public, 6-12 school with a large population of under-represented students.Technical Description: Carbon nanotubes have recently gained tremendous interest as a nanomaterial for the next-generation optoelectronics and quantum photonic devices. To date, the majority of experiments revealed, however, low quantum efficiencies due to extrinsic interactions with the environment that lower the prospects for applications. The collaborative project takes advantage of an ultra-narrow spectral linewidth regime featuring intrinsic spontaneous light emission rates and prolonged exciton dephasing in ultraclean carbon nanotubes, and integrates them with optical cavities. Specifically, the research objectives are (1) to dramatically enhance the light collection as well as the optical emission rate of carbon nanotubes in order to demonstrate efficient on-chip quantum light sources and (2) to uncover the intrinsic exciton dephasing mechanism and acoustic-phonon localization effects. The technical approach explores methods to integrate carbon nanotubes with metallo-dielectric antennas and plasmonic nanocavities, and to further engineer the exciton dephasing via manipulation of the acoustic-phonon density of states. The project advances the understanding of fundamental light-matter interaction in carbon nanotubes, in particular in the presence of localized excitons and phonons along the nanotubes and contributes to advances in on-chip quantum photonics and cavity-optomechanics.