Absence of mutual polariton scattering for strongly coupled surface plasmon polaritons and dye molecules with a large Stokes shift
The understanding and control of the dynamics of hybrid modes consisting of strongly coupled surface plasmon polaritons and molecular excitations of dye molecules is of great timely interest, as it allows one to tailor interactions between optical signals as needed for active all-optical devices. Here we utilize dye molecules with an especially large Stokes shift to demonstrate the absence of mutual scatterings among the strongly coupled hybrid modes. We employ a quantum mechanical three-level model and show that the hybrid modes decay via dephasing and internal relaxation of the molecules to a fluorescing state of the dye, which can be used as a measure for the decay. Our results provide e…
About the dynamics of strongly coupled surface plasmon polaritons and Sulforhodamine 101
We investigate the dynamics of strongly coupled surface plasmon polaritons (SPP) and molecular excitations (ME) of Sulforhodamine 101 dye. The SPPs are excited by prism coupling technique on a thin silver film with dye molecules embedded in a polymer layer on top of it. Rabi splittings with energies of 135 and 97 meV are observed in the recorded dispersion relations. Both coupled oscillator model and transfer matrix method are used to fit the experimental results. In addition to the common reflectance measurements, polarization resolved detection of scattered signal from the molecular side is also utilized. Simultaneous detection of the scattered polaritons and molecular fluorescence reveal…
Highly Sensitive plasmonic silver nanorods
We compare the single-particle plasmonic sensitivity of silver and gold nanorods with similar resonance wavelengths by monitoring the plasmon resonance shift upon changing the environment from water to 12.5% sucrose solution. We find that silver nanoparticles have 1.2 to 2 times higher sensitivity than gold, in good agreement with simulations based on the boundary-elements-method (BEM). To exclude the effect of particle volume on sensitivity, we test gold rods with increasing particle width at a given resonance wavelength. Using the Drude-model of optical properties of metals together with the quasi-static approximation (QSA) for localized surface plasmons, we show that the dominant contrib…
Single scatterings in single artificial atoms: Quantum coherence and entanglement
We employ the quantum-jump approach to study single scatterings in single semiconductor quantum dots. Two prototypical situations are investigated. First, we analyze two-photon emissions from the cascade biexciton decay of a dot where the single-exciton states exhibit a fine-structure splitting. We show that this splitting results for appropriately chosen polarization filters in an oscillatory behavior of two-photon correlations, and carefully examine the proper theoretical description of the underlying scattering processes. Secondly, we analyze the decay of a single-electron charged exciton in a quantum dot embedded in a field effect structure. We show how the quantum properties of the cha…
Plasmonic Silver Nanorod Sensitivity: Experiment and Simple Theoretical Treatment
We compare the plasmonic sensitivity of silver and gold nanorods with similar resonance wavelengths by monitoring the plasmon resonance shift of single noble metal nanorods upon changing the environment from water to sucrose solution. We find that silver nanorods have 1.2 to 2 times higher sensitivity than gold in good agreement with simulations based on the boundary-elements-method (BEM). To exclude the effect of particle volume on sensitivity, we test gold rods with increasing particle width at a given resonance wavelength. Using the Drude-model of optical properties of metal together with the quasi-static approximation (QSA) for localized surface plas-mons, we show that the dominant cont…