PhD candidate Zixi Li at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering is the co-first author on a new paper from the lab of Asst. Prof. Alex High, which demonstrates a new way to provide more powerful measurements on the atomic level. (Photo by Hong Qiao)
A collaborative research endeavor has led to the development of a quantum optical antenna providing a new tool to create entirely new research areas. The optical antenna provides a million-fold energy enhancement over traditional solid material antennas.
To date, researchers have been unable to achieve large gains in intensity with traditional atomic antennas because of the solid materials they are comprised of. "Most of the time when you have atoms in solids, they interact with the environment. There's a lot of disorder, they get shaken by phonons and face other disruptions that reduce the coherence of the signal," said Asst. professor Alex High from the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
In the research, published in Nature Photonics, a multi-institutional team of researchers solved this problem by utilizing germanium vacancy centers within diamonds to achieve an energy enhancement of six orders of magnitude in their quantum antenna. This enhancement provides an “exemplary” optical antenna which will open up entirely new areas of research.
"It's not just a breakthrough in technology. It's also a breakthrough in fundamental physics," said Zixi Li, co-first author of the paper. "While it's well-known that an excited atomic dipole can generate a near-filed with huge intensity, no one has ever demonstrated this in an experiment before."
Additionally, the antenna offers benefits other than a more powerful signal. Existing techniques such as single-molecule Raman and FRET spectroscopy boost signals using high-intensity lighting, which can cause bleaching, heating, and background fluorescence. The antenna developed by the researchers only requires nanowatts of energy to activate, effectively reducing these negative effects caused by traditional methods.
The team sees the antenna as being complementary to existing techniques and believes the antenna developed could lead to the development of novel devices and techniques used to understand how the universe works.