Optical Properties of Concentric Nanorings of Quantum Emitters

Abstract

A ring of sub-wavelength spaced dipole-coupled quantum emitters features extraordinary optical properties when compared to a one-dimensional chain or a random collection of emitters. One finds the emergence of extremely subradiant collective eigenmodes similar to an optical resonator, which feature strong 3D sub-wavelength field confinement. Motivated by structures commonly appearing in natural light harvesting complexes, we extend these studies to stacked concentric multi-ring geometries. We predict that double rings allow to engineer significantly darker and better confined collective excitation states over a broader energy band compared to the single ring case. These potentially enhance weak field absorption and low loss excitation energy transport. For the specific geometry of the three rings appearing in the natural LH2 antenna we show that the coupling between the lower double ring structure and the higher energy blue shifted single ring is very close to a critical value for the actual size of the molecule. This creates collective excitations with significant contributions from all three rings as a vital ingredient for efficient and fast coherent inter-ring transport. Such a geometry thus should prove useful for the design of sub-wavelength weak field antennas.