Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE
Spontaneous emission of rare-earth ions confined in planar multilayer dielectric microcavities
Hervé Rigneault, S. Robert, Claude Amra, Frédéric Lamarque, Serge Monneret, B. Jacquier, P. Moretti, Anne-Marie Jurdyc, Ali Belarouci
Abstract
We investigate theoretically and experimentally the optical properties of planar Ta2O5/SiO2 multilayer structures implanted with rare earth ions such as erbium and praseodymium. We demonstrate that the spontaneous emission can be strongly enhanced in a direction normal to the layers if the luminescent ions are located in the spacer of a resonant Fabry-Perot type microcavity. Nevertheless, we show that a large amount of light is emitted into the guided modes of the planar stack reducing the optical confinement which is likely to be reached within this type of dielectric microcavities.