A broadband tapered nanocavity for efficient nonclassical light emission

We present the design of a tapered nanocavity, obtained by sandwiching a photonic wire section between a planar gold reflector and a few-period Bragg mirror integrated into the tapered wire. Thanks to its ultrasmall mode volume (0.71 λ3/n3), this hybrid nanocavity largely enhances the spontaneous emission rate of an embedded quantum dot (Purcell factor: 6), while offering a wide operation bandwidth (full-width half-maximum: 20 nm).

In addition, the top tapered section shapes the cavity far-field emission into a very directive output beam, with a Gaussian spatial profile. For realistic taper dimensions, a total outcoupling efficiency to a Gaussian beam of 0.8 is predicted. Envisioned applications include bright sources of non-classical states of light, such as widely tunable sources of indistinguishable single photons and polarization-entangled photon pairs.