“Sometimes the great discoveries are looking right at us and waiting.”
Berkeley Lab researchers have developed a nano-sized optical antenna that can greatly enhance the spontaneous emission of light from atoms, molecules and semiconductor quantum dots. This advance opens the door to light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that can replace lasers for short-range optical communications, including optical interconnects for microchips, plus a host of other potential applications.
“Since the invention of the laser, spontaneous light emission has been looked down upon in favor of stimulated light emission,” says Eli Yablonovitch, an electrical engineer with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division. “However, with the proper optical antenna, spontaneous emission can actually be faster than stimulated emission.”
Yablonovitch, who also holds a faculty appointment with the University of California (UC) Berkeley where he directs the NSF Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (E3S), and is a member of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at Berkeley (Kavli ENSI), led a team that used an external antenna made from gold to effectively boost the spontaneous light emission of a nanorod made from Indium Gallium Arsenide Phosphide (InGaAsP) by 115 times. This is approaching the 200-fold increase that is considered the landmark in speed difference between stimulated and spontaneous emissions. When a 200-fold increase is reached, spontaneous emission rates will exceed those of stimulated emissions.
“With optical antennas, we believe that spontaneous emission rate enhancements of better than 2,500 times are possible while still maintaining light emission efficiency greater than 50-percent,” Yablonovitch says. “Replacing wires on microchips with antenna -enhanced LEDs would allow for faster interconnectivity and greater computational power.”
Read more: Rediscovering Spontaneous Light Emission
The Latest on: Spontaneous Light Emission
via Google News
The Latest on: Spontaneous Light Emission
- Quantum simulator shows how parts of electrons move at different speeds in 1Don June 16, 2022 at 11:00 am
A quantum simulator at Rice University is giving physicists a clear look at spin-charge separation, the quantum world's version of the magician's illusion of sawing a person in half.
- Symphony of plasmons: Giant enhancement of two-dimensional excitonic upconversionon June 12, 2022 at 5:00 pm
In summary, based on locally enhanced light field and accelerated spontaneous emission, Chinese scientists realized phonon-assisted giant upconversion enhancement of 2D excitons through doubly ...
- Laser Lighting, LiFi And LiDAR - Enabling Transportation Safety and Autonomyon June 10, 2022 at 12:47 pm
These light sources have been in production since ... “simulated emission (in lasers) versus spontaneous emission (in LEDs) enables higher power density and superior beam shape, with 100X ...
- Laser threshold magnetometry promises sensitive magnetic sensorson June 8, 2022 at 7:37 am
the absorption of red light induced by green laser irradiation. "Stimulated emission is responsible for this, and we were able to show that this record would not have been possible with spontaneous ...
- World's first measurement of magnetic-field-dependent stimulated emissionon June 7, 2022 at 7:11 am
They absorb green light and emit red light ... able to show that this record would not have been possible with spontaneous emission. Thus, we have experimentally demonstrated the theoretical ...
- Department of Physicson July 28, 2021 at 2:45 am
Current problems of interest are: Theoretical Quantum Optics: Spontaneous emission quenching; Control of the group velocity of light via atomic coherence effects; Determination of the center-of-mass ...
- Spontaneous-emission control by photonic crystals and nanocavitieson June 29, 2021 at 12:54 am
It has been clearly demonstrated that the spontaneous emission from light emitters embedded in photonic crystals can be suppressed by the so-called photonic bandgap, whereas the emission ...
- Nonlinear optics and quantum opticson July 28, 2016 at 11:05 am
Due to the selection rules for angular momenta circularly polarized light will couple only to one of the Zeeman substates of the ground state and thus the population of this level will be reduced.
via Bing News