46 research outputs found
Ultrabright room-temperature single-photon emission from nanodiamond nitrogen-vacancy centers with sub-nanosecond excited-state lifetime
Ultrafast emission rates obtained from quantum emitters coupled to plasmonic
nanoantennas have recently opened fundamentally new possibilities in quantum
information and sensing applications. Plasmonic nanoantennas greatly improve
the brightness of quantum emitters by dramatically shortening their
fluorescence lifetimes. Gap plasmonic nanocavities that support strongly
confined modes are of particular interest for such applications. We demonstrate
single-photon emission from nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in nanodiamonds
coupled to nanosized gap plasmonic cavities with internal mode volumes about 10
000 times smaller than the cubic vacuum wavelength. The resulting structures
features sub-nanosecond NV excited-state lifetimes and detected photon rates up
to 50 million counts per second. Analysis of the fluorescence saturation allows
the extraction of the multi-order excitation rate enhancement provided by the
nanoantenna. Efficiency analysis shows that the NV center is producing up to
0.25 billion photons per second in the far-field
Broadband enhancement of spontaneous emission from nitrogen-vacancy centers in nanodiamonds by hyperbolic metamaterials
We experimentally demonstrate a broadband enhancement of emission from nitrogen-vacancy centers in nanodiamonds. The enhancement is achieved by using a multilayer metamaterial with hyperbolic dispersion. The metamaterial is fabricated as a stack of alternating gold and alumina layers. Our approach paves the way towards the construction of efficient single-photon sources as planar on-chip devices. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC