Abstract
Fluorescence spectroscopy is commonly employed to study the excited-state photophysics of organic molecules. Planar Fabry-Pérot microcavities play an essential role in such studies and a strategic cavity design is necessary to attain an enhanced light-matter interaction. In this work, we computationally study different geometries for a planar metallic Fabry-Pérot microcavity tuned for the absorption of Sulforhodamine 101, a typical dye for fluorescence spectroscopy. The cavity consists of a polymer layer enclosed between two silver mirrors, where the thicknesses of all the three layers are varied to optimize the cavity. Our transfer-matrix and finite-difference time-domain simulations suggest that a cavity with 30 nm thin top mirror and 200 nm fully reflective thick bottom mirror, thus having only reflection and absorption and no transmission, is an optimal design for maximizing the Purcell factor and spectral overlap between the cavity and molecule, while still sustaining an efficient measurability of the fluorescence.
Highlights
Planar metallic FP microcavities are popular in spectroscopy [3, 6] since they are simpler to fabricate and realize than dielectric cavities [11, 12]
We computationally investigated different geometries of a planar metallic FP microcavity tuned for the absorption of sulforhodamine 101 (SR101)
To quantify the total fluorescence measurability, we defined IFL = FPTavgFEFA, which takes into account all the above properties
Summary
Low-Q planar Fabry-Pérot (FP) microcavities, doped with photoactive organic molecules, are essential in exploring light-matter interactions under weak [1,2,3,4] and strong coupling limit [5, 6], and often employed in the studies of excited-state photochemistry [7, 8], photovoltaics [9], and cavity-quantum electrodynamics [10]. Planar metallic FP microcavities are popular in spectroscopy [3, 6] since they are simpler to fabricate and realize than dielectric cavities [11, 12]. The usual choice has been to do the excitation or detection via light leaking through a thin enough mirror, which, limits the quality factor (Q) of the microcavity to well below hundred. Mode volumes (Vm) of the all-metallic microcavities are really small, which in the case of multimolecule coupling is enough to drive the system even to an ultrastrong coupling regime [13].
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