Optical routing and switching of energy flow in nanostructure systems

Abstract

We study optical routing and switching of energy transfer between semiconductor quantum dots and metallic nanostructures. We demonstrate that in the presence of a metallic nanoshell, one can use quantum coherence to direct or switch energy transfer flow from a quantum dot to another quantum dot or to the nanoshell. Our results show that a quantum dot-metallic nanoshell system can act as a bistable energy switch formed via quantum mechanical control of energy transfer processes.