Engineering Photoluminescence with Mie Voids

TL;DR

This paper introduces silicon Mie voids to independently control excitation enhancement and quantum yield in photoluminescence, validated through simulations and experiments, enabling advanced nanophotonic devices and encrypted displays.

Contribution

The work demonstrates a novel Mie void design that allows independent tuning of emission properties at the nanoscale, minimizing optical losses and enabling multimodal nanophotonic patterning.

Findings

Validated the independent control of excitation and emission enhancement.

Achieved near-diffraction-limited pixel encoding of logos in multiple optical modes.

Confirmed accelerated radiative decay via modified optical LDOS.

Abstract

Spontaneous emission, as a fundamental radiative process and a versatile information carrier, plays a vital role in light-emitting devices, optical information modulation and encryption, super-resolution fluorescence imaging. Engineering the photonic environment surrounding photon emitters enables control over their emission properties. However, simultaneously achieving precise engineering of both excitation enhancement and quantum-yield modulation at the nanoscale remains elusive, highlighting substantial room for advancing the precise orchestrating of photoluminescence. Here, we introduce silicon Mie voids - air-defined cavities that invert the conventional solid-particle geometry - to achieve independent tuning of photoluminescence within a single subwavelength unit, while minimizing optical losses. Full-wave simulations and experiments on both gradient and uniform Mie-void arrays jointly validate this quantitative framework for spontaneous emission tuning, which disentangles excitation enhancement arising from local field confinement in air and quantum-yield enhancement resulting from strengthened emitter-resonator coupling, while confirming the accelerated radiative decay enabled by the modified optical LDOS. Leveraging this flexible mechanism, we realize a multimodal nanophotonic pattern with near-diffraction-limited pixels that encode the EPFL logo in the bright field and the SJTU logo in both dark field and photoluminescence maps. These results establish Mie voids as a powerful platform for high-density multimodal encrypted displays and open new avenues for advancing state-of-the-art nanophotonic devices.