Enhancement of electric and magnetic dipole transition of rare-earth doped thin films tailored by high-index dielectric nanostructures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a straightforward method to map electric and magnetic dipole emission enhancements from rare-earth doped thin films near dielectric nanostructures, enabling detailed characterization of their optical responses.

Contribution

The authors develop a simple, high-resolution technique to separately image electric and magnetic dipole emissions near dielectric nanostructures using rare-earth ions.

Findings

Successful mapping of electric and magnetic emission enhancements.

Significant separation observed between electric and magnetic near-field contributions.

Method demonstrated on silicon nanorods and dimers.

Abstract

We propose a simple experimental technique to separately map the emission from electric and magnetic dipole transitions close to single dielectric nanostructures, using a few nanometer thin film of rare-earth ion doped clusters. Rare-earth ions provide electric and magnetic dipole transitions of similar magnitude. By recording the photoluminescence from the deposited layer excited by a focused laser beam, we are able to simultaneously map the electric and magnetic emission enhancement on individual nanostructures. In spite of being a diffraction-limited far-field method with a spatial resolution of a few hundred nanometers, our approach appeals by its simplicity and high signal-to-noise ratio. We demonstrate our technique at the example of single silicon nanorods and dimers, in which we find a significant separation of electric and magnetic near-field contributions. Our method paves the way towards the efficient and rapid characterization of the electric and magnetic optical response of complex photonic nanostructures.