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Probing Plasmon-NV0 Coupling at the Nanometer Scale with Photons and Fast Electrons

MetadataDetails
Publication Date2017-11-13
JournalACS Photonics
AuthorsHugo Lourenço‐Martins, Mathieu Kociak, Sophie Meuret, François Treussart, Yih Hong Lee
InstitutionsCentre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics
Citations28

The local density of optical states governs an emitters lifetime and quantum\nyield through the Purcell effect. It can be modified by a surface plasmon\nelectromagnetic field, but such a field has a spatial extension limited to a\nfew hundreds of nanometers, which complicates the use of optical methods to\nspatially probe the emitter-plasmon coupling. Here we show that a combination\nof electron-based imaging, spectroscopies and photon-based correlation\nspectroscopy enables measurement of the Purcell effect with nanometer and\nnanosecond spatio-temporal resolutions. Due to the large variability of\nradiative lifetimes of emitters embedded in nanoparticles with inhomogeneous\nsizes we relied on a statistical approach to unambiguously probe the coupling\nbetween nitrogen-vacancy centers (NV^0) in nanodiamonds and surface plasmons in\nsilver nanocubes. We quantified the Purcell effect by measuring the NV^0\nexcited state lifetimes in a large number of either isolated nanodiamonds or\nnanodiamond-nanocube dimers and demonstrated a statistically significant\nlifetime reduction for dimers.\n