Study on manipulating photonic environment of emitters with scale dependent optical cavities

Photon emitters placed into an optical cavity will experience a surrounding photonic environment change, which is essential to push nanophotonic devices into the practical realm, including photonic switches, quantum networking and nano-lasers. Spontaneous emission of emitters plays a critical role in determining the performance of many photonic devices. Both dielectric microcavity and plasmonic nanocavity provide a platform to control the decay channels of integrated emitters, and their coupling strength, g, yields: , where N is the involved number of excitons and V is the mode volume of a cavity. The coupling strength can be enhanced by scaling down the cavity volume. Although it difficult to boost this interaction in individual single photon emitters, approaching the quantum limit of coherent interactions between individual quantum emitters and cavity resonators is crucial for fundamental quantum mechanics as well as practical applications. In this thesis, we investigated the light-matter interaction by coupling emitters with photonic and plasmonic optical cavities. We scaled down both cavity volume from photonic crystals to gap plasmonic nanocavities and the size of emitters from film, monolayer to localized single photon sources. Photonic emitters experienced a photonic environment change from broadband confinement in photonic crystals to extreme field confinement in gap plasmonic nanocavities. By scaling down the size of the cavity volume from micrometers to nanometers, we successfully manipulate light emission with high extraction in photonic crystals at weak coupling regime and strong light-matter interaction in plasmonic nanocavities. Finally, we also demonstrated single photon emitters in laser irradiated hexagonal boron nitride monolayers and the modification of spontaneous emission of quantum emitters using plasmonic resonators.Doctor of Philosoph