Regensburg 2019 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik
O 50: Plasmonics & Nanooptics III: STM and Time-Resolved Methods (joint session O/CPP)
O 50.3: Vortrag
Mittwoch, 3. April 2019, 11:00–11:15, H8
Photon super-bunching from a metal-metal tunnel junction — Christopher C. Leon1, Anna Rosławska1, •Abhishek Grewal1, Olle Gunnarsson1, Klaus Kuhnke1, and Klaus Kern1,2 — 1Max-Planck-Institut für Festkörperforschung, Stuttgart, Germany — 2Institut de Physique, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Generating correlated photon pairs at the nanoscale is a prerequisite to creating highly-integrated optoelectronic circuits that perform quantum computing tasks based on heralded single-photons. Here, we report on the observation of bunched light emission from a generic tunnel junction under DC-bias. Using LT-STM coupled with Hanbury Brown-Twiss interferometer we probe the dynamics of the photon stream emitted by a metal-metal junction. The inelastic tunneling events of single electrons produce a plasmonic emission whose bunching factor can be 17 (super-bunching) when measured with 53 picosecond instrument resolution. Spectral filtering indicates that two photons of energy higher and lower than half the tunneling electron energy participate in bunching.
We show that mechanisms such as mechanical instabilities at the tip apex, electron co-tunneling, and electronic detection artifacts can be excluded, confirming the non-triviality of the emission. The 1 e−→ nγ process is promoted by the localized Purcell effect in conjunction with optical nonlinearities due to inversion symmetry breaking at the tunnel junction. The results suggest that an optoelectronic component useful for quantum computing can be miniaturized to the atomic scale.