Vertical Emission of Blue Light from a Symmetry Breaking Plasmonic Nanocavity-Emitter System Supporting Bound States in the Continuum

TL;DR

This paper introduces a symmetry-breaking plasmonic nanocavity system supporting bound states in the continuum, enabling high-Q resonances, enhanced blue light emission, and topological properties for advanced nanoscale light sources.

Contribution

The study designs and experimentally demonstrates a symmetry-breaking plasmonic honeycomb nanocavity supporting high-Q quasi-BIC modes with topological features, improving emission and beam control.

Findings

Achieved Q-factors exceeding 10^6 in nanocavities.

Demonstrated 32-fold emission enhancement from quantum dots.

Realized vertical blue light emission with narrow beam divergence.

Abstract

The concept of photonic bound states in the continuum (BICs), introduced in structured metallic surface cavities, provides a crucial mechanism for designing plasmonic open-resonant cavities with high quality (high-Q) factors, making significant advances in plasmonic nanophotonics. However, the two major bottlenecks for plasmonic nanocavities: enhancing emission and big beam divergence for quantum emitters, due to the strong intrinsic Ohmic losses of metals. Here, we propose and realize a {\sigma}h symmetry-breaking plasmonic honeycomb nanocavities (PHC) that support quasi-BIC resonance modes with high-Q factors. Our anodic oxidation-engineered strategy breaks out-of-plane symmetry while preserving in-plane symmetry, enabling the PHC to exhibit collective plasmonic lattice resonances (PLR) couplings and achieve Q-factors exceeding 106. Experimentally, we couple perovskite quantum dots (PQDs) to the PHC, demonstrating effective tuning of their emission properties and beam quality in the blue spectral region, achieving a 32-fold emission enhancement by suppress Ohmic loss and the life time of quantum emitters, simultaneously realize vertical emission in the 2.556 - 2.638 eV region, with a far-field hexagonal beam shape and a full width at half maximum of 12.6 degree under optimal coupling conditions. Furthermore, we demonstrate topological band inversion characterized by Zak phase transitions by continuously tuning the system parameters, confirming that the PHC supports topologically non-trivial q-BIC due to PLR coupling. The PHC presents itself as a promising next-generation, high-brightness nanoscale light source matrix, which can be directly scaled up to cover a wide wavelength range from UV to IR.