Purcell effect at metal-insulator transitions

Abstract

We investigate the spontaneous emission rate of a two-level quantum emitter next to a composite medium made of randomly distributed metallic inclusions embedded in a dielectric host matrix. In the near-field, the Purcell factor can be enhanced by two-orders of magnitude relative to the case of an homogeneous metallic medium, and reaches its maximum precisely at the insulator-metal transition. By unveiling the role of the decay pathways on the emitter's lifetime, we demonstrate that, close to the percolation threshold, the radiation emission process is dictated by electromagnetic absorption in the heterogeneous medium. We show that our findings are robust against change in material properties, shape of inclusions, and apply for different effective medium theories as well as for a wide range of transition frequencies.

8 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Electrical Control of Optical Emitter Relaxation Pathways enabled by Graphene
• Nonlinear Control of Tunneling Through an Epsilon-Near-Zero Channel
• Strong Purcell effect in anisotropic $\epsilon$-near-zero metamaterials
• Molding the flow of light with a magnetic field: plasmonic cloaking and directional scattering
• Enhancing Near-Field Heat Transfer in Composite Media: Effects of the Percolation Transition

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