749
(Invited) Nanotube Excitonic Emitter at the Subwavelength Scale

Thursday, 17 May 2018: 15:00
Room 205 (Washington State Convention Center)
S. V. Rotkin (The Pennsylvania State University) and B. J. Sofka (Lehigh University)
It is slightly embarrassing to accept the fact that after a decade of very intensive research on optics of single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) still there is no complete understanding of fundamental physics behind it. For example, our knowledge of excitonic effects in SWCNTs is limited, nailed at two extremes – sophisticated and often highly idealized numerical simulations of very small systems or rudimentary empirical models of more realistic systems, not even always yielding analytical results.

In this talk, one question arising in the physics of nanotube excitons is addressed: what is the shape of the excitation for a finite size SWCNT object? Since a whole SWCNT is sub-diffraction scale object, one may expect something similar to Hertz dipole, modified for a semiconductor material (as opposed to metal). To the best of our knowledge, such a solution was not known, thus a theory shedding light on the distribution of current of a nanotube excitonic emitter has been developed.

While in our earlier work we considered localization of a free excitonic wave (aka binding) on a single charged impurity[1], in this talk we assume localization effects due to SWCNT end reflections. Unlike many of earlier excitonic works we take this into account via a self-consistent response of the whole nanotube antenna. Unexpectedly, even for a charge neutral SWCNT system, plasmonic resonances were found to develop on top of the excitonic spectral response[2]. We demonstrate that these plasmonic features are robust and should be detectable in near-field experiments.

[1] BO. Tayo, SV. Rotkin, “Charge impurity as a localization center for singlet excitons in single-wall nanotubes”, Phys. Rev. B 86, 125431 (2012).

[2] B. Sofka, SV. Rotkin, “Nanotube exciton-antenna polaritons”, in preparation.

This research is supported by the NSF ECCS-1509786.

Fig. 1. Spectral current density distribution for an excitonic SWCNT emitter: 1d-current density is plotted vs. axial coordinate of a 50 nm long nanotube and vs. the frequency of excitation (in energy units).