Hyperbolic metamaterial nanoresonators make poor single-photon sources

Abstract

We study the optical properties of quantum dipole emitters coupled to hyperbolic metamaterial nano-resonators using a semi-analytical quasinormal mode approach. We show that coupling to metamaterial nano-resonators can lead to significant Purcell enhancements that are nearly an order of magnitude larger than those of plasmonic resonators with comparable geometry. However, the associated single photon output β-factors are extremely low (around 10%), far smaller than those of comparable sized metallic resonators (70%). Using a quasinormal mode expansion of the photon Green function, we describe how the low β-factors are due to increased Ohmic quenching arising from redshifted resonances, larger quality factors, and stronger confinement of light within the metal. In contrast to current wisdom, these results suggest that hyperbolic metamaterial nano-structures make poor choices for single photon sources. arXiv:1606.06957v2 [cond-mat.mes-hall]

Nonlocal quasinormal modes for arbitrarily shaped three-dimensional plasmonic resonators

“…The quantum emitter is assumed to be on resonance and aligned in polarization with the LSP mode. Recent work has shown that QNMs, when obtained in normalized form (as done in this work), accurately describe lossy plasmonic resonators using the local Drude model [20,37,56]. Here, we extend such an approach to include the nonlocal effects by introducing the expansion…”

Hyperbolic Metamaterial with Quantum Dots for Enhanced Emission and Collection Efficiencies

“…However, the issue of high quantum efficiencies in HMM structures has been a subject of debate in the last few years. [31][32][33] Recently, some reports have suggested that HMM materials suffer from huge losses and even restricted the Bright, room-temperature stable, on-demand, and highly directional light sources are essential for quantum optical technologies. A design methodology to enhance the emission and collection efficiencies for given collection optics is proposed and demonstrated.…”

“…[2][3][4][5][6][7] However, efficient photon collection from many of these emitters is a challenge due to quantum efficiencies of emitters embedded in the HMM structures to about 10%. [32] The issue of low quantum efficiency or low effective out-coupling of the emitter radiation from the structure is expected due to the large momentum mismatch between the high-k modes in the HMM structure and the k modes available in the free space. [22,34] This momentum mismatch problem can be overcome by the use of an antenna.…”

Electronic and hyperbolic dielectric properties of ZrS2/HfS2 heterostructures

“…One of the most promising applications of hyperbolic metamaterials is spontaneous emission engineering, which plays a crucial role in single photon sources and light-emission devices [21,54]. Due to the hyperbolic dispersion, a dipole emitter can couple to a large range of k-states at a single frequency, thereby increasing the number of possible decay paths.…”