Research
Quantum light–matter interactions
What can a single emitter do when the vacuum around it is engineered?
We place exactly one, two, or several quantum emitters — colloidal quantum dots, color centers in diamond, and other solid-state emitters — inside nanogap cavities, and study how the cavity rewrites their interaction with the vacuum. In this way we have made single-photon sources at telecom wavelengths with emission lifetimes of a few picoseconds, their radiative rates enhanced more than ten-thousand-fold.
We are now going after the effects that accompany such extreme enhancement: the energy shifts and collective emission the vacuum induces, coherence created by the vacuum itself, and processes that free space suppresses, such as two-photon emission and pair generation from a single nanoscale device. Together these point toward a single goal: solid-state quantum light sources, working at room temperature, whose quantum behavior is set by their environment rather than by their material.
Key papers
- Solution-processed ultrafast, room-temperature single-photon source at 1550 nm
S. Zhang, A. J. Traverso, E. A. Dolgopolova, A. Singh, H. Kishida, M. Y. Livshits, C. J. Sheehan, E. G. Bowes, J. A. Hollingsworth, M. H. Mikkelsen, ACS Nano 19, 19035–19045 (2025) - Room-temperature picosecond single photon emission from silicon vacancy center in diamond
H. Li, D. Acil, A. Boyce, C. Pederson, S. Chakravarthi, N. Yama, K.-M. C. Fu, M. H. Mikkelsen, ACS Nano 19, 19310–19317 (2025) — cover article - Plasmonic diamond membranes for ultrafast silicon vacancy emission
A. M. Boyce, H. Li, N. C. Wilson, D. Acil, A. Shams-Ansari, S. Chakravarthi, C. Pederson, Q. Shen, N. Yama, K.-M. C. Fu, M. Loncar, M. H. Mikkelsen, Nano Letters 24, 3575–3580 (2024) - Ultrafast single photon emission from a quantum dot coupled to a plasmonic nanocavity
T. B. Hoang, G. M. Akselrod, M. H. Mikkelsen, Nano Letters 16, 270–275 (2016) - Ultrafast spontaneous emission source using plasmonic nanoantennas
T. B. Hoang, G. M. Akselrod, C. Argyropoulos, J. Huang, D. R. Smith, M. H. Mikkelsen, Nature Communications 6, 7788 (2015) · DOI - Ultrafast lifetime and bright emission from graphene quantum dots using plasmonic nanogap cavities
H. Kishida, M. H. Mikkelsen, Nano Letters 22, 904–910 (2022)
The other questions
- Atomic-scale nanophotonics — How small can an optical cavity become — and what changes when it does?
- Nonlinear and ultrafast photonics — What happens to light and matter on femtosecond timescales in an extreme field?
- Cavity quantum materials — Can an electromagnetic environment change what a material is?