We explore the possibility of controlling the spontaneous emission of quantum emitters using plasmonic structures.
Although spontaneous emission is now well controlled in dielectric cavities like micropillars, microdisk or photonic crystal cavities, such structures require demanding technological developments.

Moreover, in these cavities the electromagnetic field is confined on the wavelength scale. Large quality factors are needed to obtain large Purcell factors. Although well suited to extract quasi-monochromatic single photons generated by emitters like epitaxial semiconductor quantum dots, this approach is not appropriate for spectrally broad single photon emitters operating at room temperature like N-V centers in diamonds or colloidal quantum dots.

We have studied two metallic cavities to control the spontaneous emission, with the objective of simplifying the technology to obtain bright single photon sources and to develop cavities suitable for spectrally broad emitters, operating at room temperature.

Further readings: “Full control of spontaneous emission in confined Tamm optical modes” and “Controlling spontaneous emission with plasmonic optical patch antennas“.