Highly Directional Emission and Photon Beaming from Nanocrystal Quantum Dots Embedded in Metallic Nanoslit Arrays

We demonstrate a directional beaming of photons emitted from nanocrystal quantum dots that are embedded in a subwavelength metallic nanoslit array with a divergence angle of less than 4°. We show that the eigenmodes of the structure result in localized electromagnetic field enhancements at the Bragg cavity resonances, which could be controlled and engineered in both real and momentum space. The photon beaming is achieved using the enhanced resonant coupling of the quantum dots to these Bragg cavity modes, which dominates the emission properties of the quantum dots. We show that the emission probability of a quantum dot into the narrow angular mode is 20 times larger than the emission probability to all other modes. Engineering nanocrystal quantum dots with subwavelength metallic nanostructures is a promising way for a range of new types of active optical devices, where spatial control of the optical properties of nanoemitters is essential, on both the single and many photons level.