Abstract
Plasmon–emitter hybrid nanocavity systems exhibit strong plasmon–exciton interactions at the single-emitter level, showing great potential as testbeds and building blocks for quantum optics and informatics. However, reported experiments involve only one addressable emitting site, which limits their relevance for many fundamental questions and devices involving interactions among emitters. Here we open up this critical degree of freedom by demonstrating selective far-field excitation and detection of two coupled quantum dot emitters in a U-shaped gold nanostructure. The gold nanostructure functions as a nanocavity to enhance emitter interactions and a nanoantenna to make the emitters selectively excitable and detectable. When we selectively excite or detect either emitter, we observe photon emission predominantly from the target emitter with up to 132-fold Purcell-enhanced emission rate, indicating individual addressability and strong plasmon–exciton interactions. Our work represents a step towards a broad class of plasmonic devices that will enable faster, more compact optics, communication and computation.
Highlights
Plasmon–emitter hybrid nanocavity systems exhibit strong plasmon–exciton interactions at the single-emitter level, showing great potential as testbeds and building blocks for quantum optics and informatics
The designed nanosystem consists of two silica-encapsulated colloidal quantum dots (QDs) emitters (Q1 and Q2) and three colloidal gold nanorods (GNRs; G1, G2 and G3) assembled into a U shape on a silica glass substrate (Fig. 1a) using atomic force microscopy (AFM) nanomanipulation (Methods)
In our study, AFM nanomanipulation enables the construction of the designed hybrid nanosystem
Summary
Plasmon–emitter hybrid nanocavity systems exhibit strong plasmon–exciton interactions at the single-emitter level, showing great potential as testbeds and building blocks for quantum optics and informatics. Plasmonic nanostructures are well known as efficient nanoantennas, capable of tailoring the excitation[1,2,6,25] and radiation[5,26,27,28,29,30] of single emitters, providing rich degrees of freedom for system addressing Owing to these superior properties, plasmon–emitter hybrid nanosystems hold great promise as testbeds and building blocks for quantum optics and informatics[31,32]. We open up this critical degree of freedom by demonstrating that in a properly designed plasmon–emitter hybrid nanosystem the coupled emitters can be selectively excited and detected from the far field To this end, two silica-encapsulated colloidal quantum dots (QDs) are employed as the emitters and precisely coupled to a U-shaped gold nanostructure that is designed to function as a combination of nanocavity and nanoantenna. The emission rates of both QD emitters in the nanosystem are strongly Purcell-enhanced (by ~45-fold for Q1 and ~132-fold for Q2), which indicates that both emitters strongly couple to the plasmonic modes
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