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

光的量子本质是我们社会技术进步的一个越来越重要的部分。无论是携带加密安全信息的单个光子，利用光的量子行为进行高度敏感的测量，还是推进现有的显微镜、照明或光谱分析技术，我们的技术发展都将依赖于更好地理解和操纵量子制度中的光。其中一个必要的部分必须包括了解如何控制自发光发射，这一过程决定了受激发的发射器释放光子的可能性、速度和地点。虽然这从根本上说是一个随机过程，但我们知道它可以受到发射器周围的电磁场和模式的控制。因为发射器很小(在纳米尺度上)，所以定义它们周围环境的特征必须相应地小。这项国际合作研究复杂的纳米结构如何操纵附近量子发射器的响应。将可重复、晶片规模制造三维纳米光子物体的新技术与复杂的单光子检测策略相结合，将能够表征并最终优化光子发射。这项工作的一个有趣的结果是，发射速度与位置高度相关：因为测量光子的时间也可以提供每个发射器位置的准确信息，这可能对超分辨率显微镜具有重大意义。

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.