On the Excitation and Radiative Decay Rates of Plasmonic Nanoantennas

Abstract

Plasmonic nanoantennas have the ability to confine and enhance incident electromagnetic fields into very sub-wavelength volumes, while at the same time efficiently radiating energy to the far-field. These properties have allowed plasmonic nanoantennas to be extensively used for exciting quantum emitters-such as molecules and quantum dots-and also for the extraction of photons from them for measurements in the far-field. Due to electromagnetic reciprocity, it is expected that plasmonic nanoantennas radiate energy as efficiently as an external source can couple energy to them. In this paper, we adopt a multipole expansion (Mie theory) and numerical simulations to show that although reciprocity holds, certain plasmonic antennas radiate energy much more efficiently than one can couple energy into them. This work paves the way towards designing plasmonic antennas with specific properties for applications where the near-to-far-field relationship is of high significance, such as: surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, strong coupling at room temperature, and the engineering of quantum states in nanoplasmonic devices.

arXiv comment22 pages (1.5 linespacing), 6 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Realizing strong light-matter interactions between single nanoparticle plasmons and molecular excitons at ambient conditions
• Rigorous modal analysis of plasmonic nanoresonators
• Mapping nanoscale hotspots with single-molecule emitters assembled into plasmonic nanocavities using DNA origami
• Single Atom Plasmonic Switch
• Light scattering by dielectric bodies in the Born approximation

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Nanocavities for Molecular Optomechanics: their fundamental description and applications
• Dissipation-driven formation of entangled dark states in strongly-coupled inhomogeneous many-qubit systems in solid-state nanocavities