The integration of nano-emitters into plasmonic devices with spatial control and nanometer precision has become a great challenge. In this paper, we report on the use of a smart polymer for selectively immobilizing nano-emitters on specific preselected sites of gold nanocubes (GNC). The cunning use of the polymer is twofold. First, it records both the selected site and the future emitters-GNC distance through plasmon-assisted photopolymerization. Second, because the polymer is chemically functionalized, it makes it possible to attach the nano-emitters right at the preselected polymerized sites which subsequently “recognize” the nano-emitters to get attached. Since the resulting active medium is a spatial memory of specific plasmonic modes, it is anisotropic, making the hybrid nanosources sensitive to light polarization. The ability to adjust their statistical average lifetime by controlling the thickness of the nanopolymer is demonstrated on two kinds of nano-emitters coupled to GNC: doped polystyrene nanospheres and semiconductor colloidal quantum dots.
Quantum emitters are essential for quantum optics and photonic quantum information technologies. To date, diverse quantum emitters such as single molecules, quantum dots, and color centers in diamond have been integrated onto chips by various methods which typically have complex operation. Here, our quantum emitters are colloidal CdSe/ZnS quantum dots (QDs) embedded in polymeric nanostructures. We report two approaches based on photo-polymerization for deterministically integrating quantum emitters on chips. Firstly, based on one-photon polymerization (OPP), we coupled an external excitation laser into surface ion exchanged waveguides (IEWs), the surface evanescent wave resulting in the QD-polymer ridges. In order to scale down the dimension of the QD-polymer structures, we secondly fabricated QD-polymer nano-dots on glass substrates by a direct laser writing platform (DLW) based on two-photon polymerization (TPP). A deep fabricating parameters study has been made enable us to control the dimensions of the polymer-QDs nanocomposites. Moreover, photoluminescence (PL) measurement results demonstrate the feasible and potential of our method for integrating quantum emitters onto future complex photonic chips.
Hybrid nanoplasmonics is a recent and promising branch of research, that attempts to control the energy transfer between nano-emitters and surface plasmons. Colloidal quantum dots are good emitters due to their unique set of optical properties. In our work, quantum dots were excited in close proximity to a silver nanowire and the quantum dot emission was transferred into guided propagating nanowire surface plasmons (SPs) that were scattered at the nanowire end. Compared with metallic nanoparticles, silver nanowires enable the propagation of SPs in a well-defined direction along the nanowire axis, allowing for long-distance energy transfer between the nano-emitter and a specific nanowire point of interest. The challenge related to this promising hybrid system is to control the position of quantum dots on the nanowire. Our approach of nano-emitters positioning is based on two-photon photopolymerization of a photosensitive material containing quantum dots. This approach allows one to use light for positioning the quantum dots on the plasmonic nanosystem in a controlled manner. We report on a new controlled hybrid plasmonic nanoemitter based on coupling between quantum dots and propagating surface plasmons that are supported by silver nanowires, considered as surface plasmons resonators and observed through their scattering at the nanowire ends. A parametric study of the distance between the quantum dots and the nanowire extremity shows that precise control of the position of the launching sites enables control of light intensity at the wire end, through surface plasmon propagation length. This new approach is promising to produce efficient acceptor-donor hybrid nano-systems.
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