Optical slot antennas for enhancement of WSe2 spontaneous emission rate

The spontaneous emission rate of light emitters has been shown to have strong dependence on their local electromagnetic environment¹. Optical antennas exploit this effect and can be used to greatly increase the spontaneous emission rate of a coupled light emitter. There have been several demonstrations of this effect with promising results using dye molecules and Er³⁺ ions^2,3. It is predicted that spontaneous emission rate enhancements greater than 1000x can be achieved with optical antennas while maintaining greater than 50% optical efficiency⁴. Demonstration of large spontaneous emission enhancement of semiconductor light emitters could lead to low power, high efficiency, fast light sources useful for short-range optical communications. Transition metal dichalcogenides, such as WSe2, are promising candidates for the light emitter of such a nanoLED device because they are semiconductors that maintain good quantum efficiency even with a nanoscale dimension. In this work we demonstrate an optical slot antenna coupled to a monolayer of WSe2. Photoluminescence measurements show an increase of total light emission >700x when compared to WSe2 that is not coupled to an antenna. We estimate a spontaneous emission rate enhancement of 318x is responsible for this huge increase in light emission.