A planar dielectric antenna for directional single-photon emission and near-unity collection efficiency

Single-photon sources have been discussed as the building blocks of quantum cryptography, optical quantum computation, spectroscopy, and metrology. However, when using sources based on single emitters, the success of these proposals depends on the ability to achieve near-unity collection efficiency into well-defined modes. Some of the current state-of-the-art efforts aimed at achieving these criteria have been demonstrated, but despite an impressive progress the results still fall short. In particular, a collection efficiency of 38% were reported using microresonators [1], while a nanowire device reached an efficiency of 72% at cryogenic temperatures [2]. Here we report on a broad-band room-temperature scheme, which uses a layered dielectric antenna for realizing ultra-bright single photon sources with near-unity collection efficiency.

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