Abstract

Nanostructures consisting of metals, especially of coinage metals, play a particularly important role in emitter coupled systems due to their strongly resonant behaviour when being excited by visible light. Such material and geometry dependent resonances (plasmon-polaritons) provide for extreme evanescent light localization as well as for efficient and if needed directed scattering. The tuning of these resonant phenomena by proper choice of the metals in combination with a specially designed geometry delivers the necessary degrees of freedom for spectrally matching in principle any type of coupling. One option to sensitively tune hybrid interactions is the dedicated arrangement of plasmonic building blocks as meta-atoms in two-or three-dimensional functional geometries, called metamaterials in general and hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs) for 2D layered systems. Hyperbolic metamaterials belong to the anisotropic metamaterials showing metallic behaviour in-plane (ε_‖ < 0) and strong dielectric behaviour out of plane (εǁ> 0) or vice versa. Such indefinite permittivities can result in enhanced spontaneous emission rates of quantum emitters¹.

© 2017 IEEE