Spontaneous decay process of an excited atom placed inside or outside (near the surface) a carbon nanotube is analyzed. Calculations have been performed for various achiral nanotubes. The effect of the nanotube surface has been demonstrated to dramatically increase the atomic spontaneous decay rate -- by 6 to 7 orders of magnitude compared with that of the same atom in vacuum. Such an increase is associated with the nonradiative decay via surface excitations in the nanotube.
The spontaneous decay of an excited state of an emitter placed in the vicinity of a metallic single-wall carbon nanotube (SWNT) was examined theoretically. The emitter-SWNT coupling strongly depends on the position of the emitter relative to the SWNT, the length of the SWNT, the dipole transition frequency and the orientation of the emitter. In the high-frequency regime, dips in the spectrum of the spontaneous decay rate exist at the resonance frequencies in the spectrum of the SWNT conductivity. In the intermediate-frequency regime, the SWNT conductivity is very low, and the spontaneous decay rate is practically unaffected by the SWNT. In the low-frequency regime, the spectrum of the spontaneous decay rate contains resonances at the antennas resonance frequencies for surface-wave propagation in the SWNT. Enhancement of both the total and radiative spontaneous decay rates by several orders in magnitude is predicted at these resonance frequencies. The strong emitter-field coupling is achieved, in spite of the low Q factor of the antenna resonances, due to the very high magnitude of the electromagnetic field in the near-field zone. The vacuum Rabi oscillations of the population of the excited emitter state are exhibited when the emitter is coupled to an antenna resonance of the SWNT.
Illumination of atoms by resonant lasers can pump electrons into a coherent superposition of hyperfine levels which can no longer absorb the light. Such superposition is known as dark state, because fluorescent light emission is then suppressed. Here we report an all-electric analogue of this destructive interference effect in a carbon nanotube quantum dot. The dark states are a coherent superposition of valley (angular momentum) states which are decoupled from either the drain or the source leads. Their emergence is visible in asymmetric current-voltage characteristics, with missing current steps and current suppression which depend on the polarity of the applied source-drain bias. Our results demonstrate for the first time coherent-population trapping by all-electric means in an artificial atom.
The decay of spin-valley states is studied in a suspended carbon nanotube double quantum dot via leakage current in Pauli blockade and via dephasing and decoherence of a qubit. From the magnetic field dependence of the leakage current, hyperfine and spin-orbit contributions to relaxation from blocked to unblocked states are identified and explained quantitatively by means of a simple model. The observed qubit dephasing rate is consistent with the hyperfine coupling strength extracted from this model and inconsistent with dephasing from charge noise. However, the qubit coherence time, although longer than previously achieved, is probably still limited by charge noise in the device.
We present atomically-resolved STM images of single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) embedded in a crystalline nanotube rope. Although they may be interpreted as of a chiral nanotube, the images are more consistently explained a an achiral armchair tube with a quenched twist distortion. The existence of quenched twists in SWNTs in ropes might explain the fact that both as-grown bulk nanotube material and individual ropes have insulator-like conductivity at low temperature.
We present electronic transport measurements of a single wall carbon nanotube quantum dot coupled to Nb superconducting contacts. For temperatures comparable to the superconducting gap peculiar transport features are observed inside the Coulomb blockade and superconducting energy gap regions. The observed temperature dependence can be explained in terms of sequential tunneling processes involving thermally excited quasiparticles. In particular, these new channels give rise to two unusual conductance peaks at zero bias in the vicinity of the charge degeneracy point and allow to determine the degeneracy of the ground states involved in transport. The measurements are in good agreement with model calculations.