Purcell effect of nitrogen-vacancy centers in nanodiamond coupled to propagating and localized surface plasmons revealed by photon-correlation cathodoluminescence

Abstract

We measured the second-order correlation function of the cathodoluminescence intensity and investigated the Purcell effect by comparing the lifetimes of quantum emitters with and without metal structure. The increase in the electromagnetic local density of state due to the coupling of a quantum emitter with a plasmonic structure causes a shortening of the emitter lifetime, which is called the Purcell effect. Since the plasmon-enhanced electric field is confined well below the wavelength of light, the quantum emitter lifetime is changed in the nanoscale range. In this study, we combined cathodoluminescence in scanning (transmission) electron microscopy with Hanbury Brown-Twiss interferometry to measure the Purcell effect with nanometer and nanosecond resolutions. We used nitrogen-vacancy centers contained in nanodiamonds as quantum emitters and compared their lifetime in different environments: on a thin SiO2 membrane, on a thick flat silver film, and embedded in a silver film. The lifetime reductions of nitrogen-vacancy centers were clearly observed in the samples with silver. We evaluated the lifetime by analytical calculation and numerical simulations and revealed the Purcell effects of emitters coupled to propagating and localized surface plasmons. This is the first experimental result showing the Purcell effect due to the coupling between nitrogen-vacancy centers in nanodiamonds and surface plasmon polaritons with nanometer resolution.

References in corpus (5)

• Nanometer Scale Spectral Imaging of Quantum Emitters in Nanowires and Its Correlation to Their Atomically Resolved Structure
• Spatially resolved quantum nano-optics of single photons using an electron microscope
• Nanofabrication of Plasmonic Circuits Containing Single Photon Sources
• Electron-induced state conversion in diamond NV centers measured with pump-probe cathodoluminescence spectroscopy
• Probing plasmon-NV${}^0$ coupling at the nanometer scale with photons and fast electrons

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Time-Resolved Cathodoluminescence in an Ultrafast Transmission Electron Microscope
• Time-correlated electron and photon counting microscopy
• Plasmonic-enhanced bright single spin defects in silicon carbide membranes
• Superbunching in cathodoluminescence: a master equation approach
• Unveiling the nature of cathodoluminescence from photon statistics
• Emission of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond shaped by topological photonic waveguide modes
• Fluorescence profile of a nitrogen-vacancy center in a nanodiamond
• Near-field imaging of plasmonic nanopatch antennas with integrated semiconductor quantum dots