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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Pacific Rim (CLEO-PR)

High-efficient two-photon up-conversion in an antenna-molecule complex system

Yoshiki Osaka, Nobuhiko Yokoshi, Masatoshi Nakatani, Hajime Ishihara

Published Jun 1, 2013• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An optical antenna, e.g., a metal structure of nanometer size enhances the effective scattering cross-section of molecule for single photon. We theoretically analyzed two-photon up-conversion process on four-level diamond-shaped systems coupled with an optical antenna, and found significant enhancement of the up-conversion.
DOI
10.1109/cleopr.2013.6600409

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In a previous paper [Nat. Photon. 5, 166 (2011)], we reported on a planar dielectric antenna that achieved 96% efficiency in collecting the photons emitted by a single molecule. In that work, the transition dipole moment of the molecule was set perpendicular to the antenna plane. Here, we present a theoretical extension of that scheme that reaches collection efficiencies beyond 99% for emitters with arbitrarily oriented dipole moments. Our work opens important doors in a wide range of contexts including quantum optics, quantum metrology, nanoanalytics, and biophysics. In particular, we provide antenna parameters to realize ultrabright single-photon sources in high-index materials such as semiconductor quantum dots and color centers in diamond, as well as sensitive detection of single molecules in nanofluidic devices.
We theoretically investigate the up-conversion process of two entangled photons on a molecule, which is coupled by a cavity or nanoscale metallic structure. Within one-dimensional input-output theory, the propagators of the photons are derived analytically and the up-conversion probability is calculated numerically. It is shown that the coupling with the nanostructure clearly enhances the process. We also find that the enhancement becomes further pronounced for some balanced system parameters, such as the quantum correlation between photons, radiation decay, and coupling between the nanostructure and molecule. The nonmonotonic dependencies are reasonably explained in view of quantum interference between the coupled modes of the whole system. This result indicates that controlling quantum interference and correlation is crucial for few-photon nonlinearity, and provides a new guidance to wide variety of fields, e.g., quantum electronics and photochemistry.
Optical nano-antennae have been integrated with semiconductor lasers to intensify light at the nanoscale and photodiodes to enhance photocurrent. In quantum optics, plasmonic metal structures have been used to enhance nonclassical light emission from single quantum dots. Absorption and detection of single photons from free space could also be enhanced by nanometallic antennae, but this has not previously been demonstrated. Here, we use nano-optical transmission effects in a one-dimensional gold structure, combined with optical cavity resonance, to form optical nano-antennae, which are further used to couple single photons from free space into a 80-nm-wide superconducting nanowire. This antenna-assisted coupling enables a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector with 47% device efficiency at the wavelength of 1550 nm and 9-μm-by-9-μm active area while maintaining a reset time of only 5 ns. We demonstrate nanoscale antenna-like structures to achieve exceptional efficiency and speed in single-photon detection.