We demonstrate an individual single-walled carbon nanotube light emitter integrated onto a microcavity and a waveguide operating in the telecom wavelength regime. Light emission from the carbon nanotube is enhanced at the cavity resonance and is efficiently extracted from the waveguide facet. We have transferred carbon nanotubes to a nanobeam cavity with a dry process, ensuring that an individual carbon nanotube is used. The guided light emission from a chirality-identified single carbon nanotube has a narrow linewidth of less than 1.3 nm and an off-resonance rejection of $sim$17 dB. The waveguide-coupled device configuration is compatible with fully integrated on-chip designs and is promising for carbon-nanotube-based photonics.
Ultrafast electron pulses, combined with laser-pump and electron-probe technologies, allow for various forms of ultrafast microscopy and spectroscopy to elucidate otherwise challenging to observe physical and chemical transitions. However, the pursuit of simultaneous ultimate spatial and temporal resolution has been largely subdued by the low monochromaticity of the electron pulses and their poor phase synchronization to the optical excitation pulses. State-of-the-art photon-driven sources have good monochromaticity but poor phase synchronization. In contrast, field-driven photoemission has much higher light phase synchronization, due to the intrinsic sub-cycle emission dynamics, but poor monochromaticity. Such sources suffer from larger electron energy spreads (3 - 100 eV) attributed to the relatively low field enhancement of the conventional metal tips which necessitates long pump wavelengths (> 800 nm) in order to gain sufficient ponderomotive potential to access the field-driven regime. In this work, field-driven photoemission from ~1 nm radius carbon nanotubes excited by a femtosecond laser at a short wavelength of 410 nm has been realized. The energy spread of field-driven electrons is effectively compressed to 0.25 eV outperforming all conventional ultrafast electron sources. Our new nanotube-based ultrafast electron source opens exciting prospects for attosecond imaging and emerging light-wave electronics.
Current methods for producing single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) lead to heterogeneous samples containing mixtures of metallic and semiconducting species with a variety of lengths and defects. Optical detection at the single nanotube level should thus offer the possibility to examine these heterogeneities provided that both SWNT species are equally well detected. Here, we used photothermal heterodyne detection to record absorption images and spectra of individual SWNTs. Because this photothermal method relies only on light absorption, it readily detects metallic nanotubes as well as the emissive semiconducting species. The first and second optical transitions in individual semicontucting nanotubes have been probed. Comparison between the emission and absorption spectra of the lowest-lying optical transition reveal mainly small Stokes shifts. Side bands in the near-infrared absorption spectra are observed and assigned to exciton-phonon bound states. No such sidebands are detected around the lowest transition of metallic nanotubes.
Single-nanotube photometry was used to measure the product of absorption cross-section and fluorescence quantum yield for 12 (n,m) structural species of semiconducting SWNTs in aqueous SDBS suspension. These products ranged from 1.7 to 4.5 x 10(-19) cm2/C atom, generally increasing with optical band gap as described by the energy gap law. The findings suggest fluorescent quantum yields of ~8% for the brightest, (10,2) species and introduce the empirical calibration factors needed to deduce quantitative (n,m) distributions from bulk fluorimetric intensities.
The mechanical properties of light have found widespread use in the manipulation of gas-phase atoms and ions, helping create new states of matter and realize complex quantum interactions. The field of cavity-optomechanics strives to scale this interaction to much larger, even human-sized mechanical objects. Going beyond the canonical Fabry-Perot cavity with a movable mirror, here we explore a new paradigm in which multiple cavity-optomechanical elements are wired together to form optomechanical circuits. Using a pair of optomechanical cavities coupled together via a phonon waveguide we demonstrate a tunable delay and filter for microwave-over-optical signal processing. In addition, we realize a tight-binding form of mechanical coupling between distant optomechanical cavities, leading to direct phonon exchange without dissipation in the waveguide. These measurements indicate the feasibility of phonon-routing based information processing in optomechanical crystal circuitry, and further, to the possibility of realizing topological phases of photons and phonons in optomechanical cavity lattices.
Graphene is an ideal material for integrated nonlinear optics thanks to its strong light-matter interaction and large nonlinear optical susceptibility. Graphene has been used in optical modulators, saturable absorbers, nonlinear frequency converters, and broadband light emitters. For the latter application, a key requirement is the ability to control and engineer the emission wavelength and bandwidth, as well as the electronic temperature of graphene. Here, we demonstrate that the emission wavelength of graphene$$ s broadband hot carrier photoluminescence can be tuned by integration on photonic cavities, while thermal management can be achieved by out-of-plane heat transfer to hexagonal boron nitride. Our results pave the way to graphene-based ultrafast broadband light emitters with tunable emission.