Cavity quantum electrodynamics in a carbon nanotube

Igor V. Bondarev

J. J. Viennot, José M. Palomo, Takis Kontos

We report on a dry transfer technique for single wall carbon nanotube devices, which allows to embed them in high finesse microwave cavity. We demonstrate the ground state charge readout and a quality factor of about 3000 down to the single photon regime. This technique allows to make devices such as double quantum dots, which could be instrumental for achieving the strong spin photon coupling. It can easily be extended to generic carbon nanotube based microwave devices.

Abubakr Muhammad, Motivational Examples

J. C. Garrison, R. Y. Chiao

Adrien Jeantet

Carbon nanotubes are extensively investigated for their amazing mechanical and electronic properties. Optically, they are excellent candidates for on-demand single-photon sources because they can be electrically excited and they can emit anti-bunched light at room temperature in the telecoms bands. However, their emission efficiency is low, its origins remain unclear and the spectral shape of their photoluminescence is complicated. In this work, we build an original setup combining a confocal microscope and a fiber based micro-cavity which is both spatially and spectrally tunable. With this device, we observed the rise of cavity quantum electrodynamics effects by analyzing the evolution of the dipole-cavity coupling as a function of the cavity volume. We obtained a strong acceleration of the spontaneous emission rate, due to Purcell factors above 100. The associated effective efficiency of the source reaches up to 50%, leading to a brightness of up to 10%, while keeping excellent anti-bunching features. We observe the effect of the cavity coupling as a function of the cavity detuning, and develop a model to account for emitters undergoing exciton-phonon coupling in the presence of a cavity. We show that our single-photon source is tunable on a range of frequencies more than a hundred times higher than the cavity spectral width, opening the way to extensive multiplexing. Further strengthening of the coupling may open the way to the very rich physics of one-dimensional cavity polaritons. And conversely, cavity polaritons could be a tool to understand better the diffusion, and localization properties of excitons in carbon nanotubes. Finally, the original setup build here is extremely versatile and could be used to coupled other types of emitters, such as nano-diamonds or molecules.