Resonantly Enhanced Emission from a Luminescent Nanostructured Waveguide

Controlling the characteristics of photon emission represents a significant challenge for both fundamental science and device technologies. Research on microcavities, photonic crystals, and plasmonic nanocavities has focused on controlling spontaneous emission by way of designing a resonant structure around the emitter to modify the local density of photonic states. In this work, we demonstrate resonantly enhanced emission using luminescent nanostructured waveguide resonance (LUNAR). Our concept is based on coupling between emitters in the luminescent waveguide and a resonant waveguide mode that interacts with a periodic nanostructure and hence outcouples via diffraction. We show that the enhancement of resonance emission can be controlled by tuning the design parameters. We also demonstrate that the enhanced emission is attributable to the accelerated spontaneous emission rate that increases the probability of photon emission in the resonant mode, accompanied by enhanced the local density of photonic states. This study demonstrates that nanostructured luminescent materials can be designed to exhibit functional and enhanced emission. We anticipate that our concept will be used to improve the performance of a variety of photonic and optical applications ranging from bio/chemical sensors to lighting, displays and projectors.