Nanometric voids as optical antennas for rewritable momentum-engineered photonics in silicon

Abstract

Optical antennas are widely used to localize electromagnetic fields far below the diffraction limit, enabling enhanced light-matter interactions across nanophotonics. Yet the regime in which optical confinement approaches the electronic de Broglie wavelength in a solid - where the photon momentum distribution broadens sufficiently to relax optical selection rules - remains largely unexplored. Here we show that nanometric voids embedded within crystalline silicon act as such optical antennas, dramatically altering the optical response of an indirect semiconductor without the introduction of any foreign material. Using an electrically induced melt-quench process, we generate nanometric voids throughout bulk silicon, confirmed by high-resolution electron microscopy, diffraction analysis, Fourier-filtered lattice reconstruction, elemental mapping, and supported by optical and vibrational spectroscopies. The void-containing silicon exhibits intense broadband photo- and electroluminescence spectrally indistinguishable from that produced by metallic or semiconductor nanoconfiners of similar dimensions, establishing that dielectric discontinuity, not confiner composition, governs the observed momentum-assisted optical transitions. The luminescence can be repeatedly written, erased, and rewritten through alternating electrical conditioning and optical recrystallization. These findings establish nanometric voids as a previously unexplored platform for extreme optical confinement and demonstrate that photonic functionality can be embedded and reconfigured directly within bulk silicon.