Enhancing spontaneous emission from quantum emitters via plasmonic sub-diffraction nanocavities

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The quantum nature of light is an increasingly important part of our society's technological advancement. Be it single photons carrying bits of cryptographically secure information, exploiting the quantum behaviour of light for highly sensitive measurements or advancing existing the technologies of microscopy, illumination or spectroscopy, our technological development will rely on better understanding and manipulating light in the quantum regime. A necessary part of that must include understanding how to control the spontaneous emission of light, process that determines how likely, how quickly and where an excited emitter will release a photon. While this is a fundamentally stochastic process, we know that it can be manipulated by the electromagnetic fields and modes surrounding an emitter. Because the emitters are small (on the scale of nanometers), the features defining their surroundings must be correspondingly small. This international collaboration studies how sophisticated nanofabricated structures can manipulate the response of nearby quantum emitters. Combining novel techniques for repeatable, wafer-scale fabrication of three dimensional nanophotonic objects with sophisticated single photon detection strategies will enable the characterization, and ultimately optimization of photon emission. An interesting consequence of this work stems from the rate of emission being extremely position specific: because measuring the timing of photons can also provide precise information of each emitter's location, this could have significant implications for super-resolution microscopy.