Room-temperature single photon sources with definite circular and linear polarizations

Quantum Dot Fluorescence in Photonic Bandgap Glassy Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Structures: Microcavity Resonance under CW-Excitation, Antibunching and Decay Time

“…We placed NQD-doped oligomeric material on a buffed coverslip, and heated it to above the CLC oligomer clearing temperature, T c ∼180 • C. The sample was then cooled to ∼135 • C, a second coverslip was placed above the first, and the two coverslips were sheared in the direction of buffing. The oligomer was then slowly cooled to the glassy state [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18], preserving planar-aligned CLC order (the glass-transition temperature T g is ∼50 • C [18]). ] of a home-made, confocal fluorescence microscope with an oil-immersion, 1.35 NA objective to focus laser light into the CLC cell.…”

“…Refs. [14][15]18] reported circularly-polarized NQD fluorescence of definite handedness due to microcavity chirality. In our paper [20] we reported for the first time significant coupling of NQD fluorescence with a CLC photonic bandgap microcavity.…”

“…Recently, liquid crystals (LC) doped with single emitters were used in polarized single-photon sources for secure quantum communication applications [11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

Single-photon experiments with liquid crystals for quantum science and quantum engineering applications

“…The first part (Section 2) of this paper is an overview of the main results of our more than 10-A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 4 years research on using planar-aligned monomeric or oligomeric cholesteric and nematic liquid crystals for efficiently producing single photons with definite circular and linear polarizations [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][35][36][37][38].…”

“…In addition to high-power applications of liquid crystals in laser optics [1][2][3][4][5], optical power limiters [6][7], cholesteric lasers [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16], some recent new photonics applications of liquid crystals are phase plates with singularities (including q-plates with inhomogeneous patterned distribution of the local optical axis in the transverse plane) [17][18][19][20][21][22][23] and nanophotonics [24][25][26]. The purpose of this paper is to familiarize the reader with some applications of liquid crystals in quantum science and quantum engineering using as examples the experiments and methods developed at the Institute of Optics, University of Rochester [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]. Quantum optical applications of liquid crystals, mostly connected with angular momentum of light and its manipulation using q-plates, were also reported by Italian groups [17-20, 22-23, 42-43].…”