Coupling of a Single Quantum Emitter to End-to-end Aligned Silver Nanowires

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the coupling of a single nitrogen vacancy center in a nanodiamond to plasmonic modes in silver nanowires, showing enhanced decay rates and potential for controllable emission splitting.

Contribution

It reports the first observation of NV center coupling to end-to-end aligned silver nanowires and explores their use as controllable emission splitters.

Findings

Enhanced decay rate of NV centers due to plasmon coupling

Successful nano-assembly of nanodiamond and nanowires

Simulations show controllable emission splitting with aligned nanowires

Abstract

We report on the observation of coupling a single nitrogen vacancy (NV) center in a nanodiamond crystal to a propagating plasmonic mode of silver nanowires. The nanocrystal is placed either near to the apex of a single silver nanowire or in the gap between two end-to-end aligned silver nanowires. We observe an enhancement of the NV-centers' decay rate in both cases as a result of the coupling to the plasmons. The devices are nano-assembled with a scanning probe technique. Through simulations, we show that end-to-end aligned silver nanowires can be used as a controllable splitter for emission from a dipole emitter.