LIGHT EMITTING MATERIALS AND CONTROL OF THEIR EMISSION PROPERTIES FOR APPLICATIONS IN INTEGRATED OPTICS

The field of nanophotonics has had numerous great achievements in the past few years (for a brief overview, see [1]). The scaling down of optical devices has created a need for active, light emitting materials whose properties need to be controlled for usage at such small scales. This dissertation presents results on the control of the emission of different light emitting materials. Chapter one presents a brief discussion of active materials for on-chip applications, what they are and their uses. Chapter two deals with the enhancement of CdSe quantum dots embedded in a microcavity. After a brief overview of the density of photon modes and how enhancement can be achieved, the experimental details and results are presented, showing enhancement of the photoluminescence of the quantum dots by a factor of 2.7. The third chapter discusses experiments with CdSe dots and resonant energy transfer. This effect involves a donor and an acceptor in close proximity, with the former ”giving ” its energy to the latter. The emission of the acceptor is furthe