Nanometer-scale photon confinement in topology-optimized dielectric cavities

Abstract

Nanotechnology enables in principle a precise mapping from design to device but relied so far on human intuition and simple optimizations. In nanophotonics, a central question is how to make devices in which the light-matter interaction strength is limited only by materials and nanofabrication. Here, we integrate measured fabrication constraints into topology optimization, aiming for the strongest possible light-matter interaction in a compact silicon membrane, demonstrating an unprecedented photonic nanocavity with a mode volume of $V\sim 3\times 10^{-4}{\lambda }^3$, quality factor $Q\sim 1100$, and footprint $4{\lambda }^2$ for telecom photons with a $\lambda \sim 1550$ nm wavelength. We fabricate the cavity, which confines photons inside 8 nm silicon bridges and use near-field optical measurements to perform the first experimental demonstration of photon confinement to a single hotspot well below the diffraction limit in dielectrics.

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Cited by in corpus (20)

• Observation of strong backscattering in valley-Hall photonic topological interface modes
• Roadmap on Nonlocality in Photonic Materials and Metamaterials
• Optomechanical generation of coherent GHz vibrations in a phononic waveguide
• Free-form inverse design of arbitrary dispersive materials in nanophotonics
• Ultraconfined plasmons in atomically thin crystalline silver nanostructures
• Multimode optomechanics with a two-dimensional optomechanical crystal
• Fluorescence enhancement in topologically optimized gallium phosphide all-dielectric nanoantennas
• Generalized Dicke model and gauge-invariant master equations for two atoms in ultrastrongly-coupled cavity quantum electrodynamics
• A stochastic approach to the quantum noise of a single-emitter nanolaser
• Omnidirectional gradient force optical trapping in dielectric nanocavities by inverse design
• Engineering optical forces through Maxwell stress tensor inverse design
• Cavity QED based on strongly localized modes: exponentially enhancing single-atom cooperativity
• Gain-compensated metal cavity modes and a million-fold improvement of Purcell factors
• Many-Body Entanglement in Solid-State Emitters
• SUPER excitation of quantum emitters is a multi-photon process
• Nonlinear Quantum Electrodynamics of Epsilon-Near-Zero Nanocavities
• Efficient first-principles inverse design of nanolasers
• Eigenvalue-accelerated LDOS optimization of high-Q optical resonances
• Purcell-enhanced optical refrigeration
• A deterministic approach for integrating an emitter in a nanocavity with subwavelength light confinement