Plasmon-exciton polaritons provide exciting possibilities to control light-matter interactions at the nanoscale by enabling closer investigation of quantum optical effects and facilitating novel technologies based, for instance, on Bose-Einstein condensation and polaritonic lasing. Nevertheless, observing and visualising polaritons is challenging, and traditional optical microscopy techniques often lead to ambiguities regarding the emergence and strength of the plasmon-exciton coupling.Electron microscopy offers a more robust means to study and verify the nature of plexcitons, but is still hindered by instrument limitations and resolution. A simple theoretical description of electron beam-excited plexcitons is therefore vital to complement ongoing experimental efforts.Here we apply analytic solutions for the electron-loss and photon-emission probabilities to evaluate plasmon-exciton coupling studied either with the recently adopted technique of electron energyloss spectroscopy, or with the so-far unexplored in this context cathodoluminescence spectroscopy.Foreseeing the necessity to account for quantum corrections in the plasmonic response, we extend these solutions within the framework of general nonlocal hydrodynamic descriptions. As a specific example we study core-shell spherical emitter-molecule hybrids, going beyond the standard localresponse approximation through the hydrodynamic Drude model for screening and the generalised nonlocal optical response theory for nonlocal damping. We show that electron microscopies are extremely powerful in describing the interaction of emitters with the otherwise weakly excited by optical means higher-order plasmonic multipoles, a response that survives when quantum-informed models are considered. Our work provides therefore both a robust theoretical background and supporting argumentation to the open quest for improving and further utilising electron microscopies in strong-coupling nanophotonics.
In this paper, we propose an efficient method for the calculation of the cutoff wavenumbers of coaxial elliptical-circular and circular-elliptical metallic waveguides. The cutoff wavenumbers are obtained through closed-form expressions making the evaluation efficient, and moreover, very accurate even for large values of the eccentricity of the elliptical boundary. The resulting formulas are free of Mathieu functions, including only simple algebraic expressions with Bessel functions, and are valid for every different value of the indices and , corresponding to every higher order or mode. The validation of the method is performed by comparing to the general exact solution. The efficiency and accuracy of our method is presented by illustrative examples. Numerical results are given for the cutoff wavenumbers of various higher order modes.
AbstractMagneto-optical materials have become a key tool in functional nanophotonics, mainly due to their ability to offer active tuning between two different operational states in subwavelength structures. In the long-wavelength limit, such states may be considered as the directional forward- and back-scattering operations, due to the interplay between magnetic and electric dipolar modes, which act as equivalent Huygens sources. In this work, on the basis of full-wave electrodynamic calculations based on a rigorous volume integral equation (VIE) method, we demonstrate the feasibility of obtaining magnetically-tunable directionality inversion in spherical microresonators (THz antennas) coated by magneto-optical materials. In particular, our analysis reveals that when a high-index dielectric is coated with a magneto-optical material, we can switch the back-scattering of the whole particle to forward-scattering simply by turning off/on an external magnetic field bias. The validity of our calculations is confirmed by reproducing the above two-state operation, predicted by the VIE, with full-wave finite-element commercial software. Our results are of interest for the design of state-of-the-art active metasurfaces and metalenses, as well as for functional nanophotonic structures, and scattering and nanoantennas engineering.
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