Broadband Purcell effect: Radiative decay engineering with metamaterials

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how hyperbolic metamaterials can create a broadband Purcell effect, significantly enhancing spontaneous emission over a wide frequency range, enabling advanced quantum and photonic device applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel broadband Purcell effect using hyperbolic metamaterials, overcoming bandwidth limitations of traditional resonant systems for light-matter interaction control.

Findings

Hyperbolic metamaterials exhibit a broad PDOS singularity.

Broadband Purcell enhancement enables efficient single-photon sources.

Potential applications include quantum communication and biosensing.

Abstract

Engineering the photonic density of states (PDOS) using resonant microcavities or periodic dielectric media gives control over a plethora of classical and quantum phenomena associated with light. Here, we show that nanostructured metamaterials with hyperbolic dispersion, possess a broad bandwidth singularity in the PDOS, an effect not present in any other photonic system, which allows remarkable control over light-matter interactions. A spectacular manifestation of this non-resonant PDOS alteration is the broadband Purcell effect, an enhancement in the spontaneous emission of a light source, which ultimately leads to a device that can efficiently harness a single photon from an isolated emitter. Our approach differs from conventional resonant Purcell effect routes to single photon sources with a limitation in bandwidth, which places restrictions on the probable use of such methods for practical device applications, especially at room temperature. The proposed metadevice, useful for applications from quantum communications to biosensing also opens up the possibility of using metamaterials to probe the quantum electrodynamic properties of atoms and artificial atoms such as quantum dots.