Spontaneous emission control in a tunable hybrid photonic system
Martin Frimmer and A. Femius Koenderink
Accepted
We experimentally demonstrate control of the rate of spontaneous emission in a tunable hybrid photonic system that consists of two canonical building blocks for spontaneous emission control, an optical antenna and a mirror, each providing a modification of the local density of optical states (LDOS). We couple fluorophores to a plasmonic antenna to create a superemitter with an enhanced decay rate. In a superemitter analog of the seminal Drexhage experiment we probe the LDOS of a nanomechanically approached mirror. Due to the electrodynamic interaction of the antenna with its own mirror image the superemitter traces the inverse {of the LDOS enhancement provided by} the mirror, in stark contrast to a bare source, whose decay rate is proportional to the mirror LDOS\@.