Bright upconverted emission from light-induced inelastic tunneling

Upconverted light from nanostructured metal surfaces can be produced by harmonic generation and multi-photon luminescence; however, these are very weak processes and require extremely high field intensities to produce a measurable signal. Here we report on bright emission, 5 orders of magnitude grea...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Optics express 2020-05, Vol.28 (11), p.16497-16510
Main Authors: Rakhmatov, Eradzh, Alizadehkhaledi, Amirhossein, Hajisalem, Ghazal, Gordon, Reuven
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:Upconverted light from nanostructured metal surfaces can be produced by harmonic generation and multi-photon luminescence; however, these are very weak processes and require extremely high field intensities to produce a measurable signal. Here we report on bright emission, 5 orders of magnitude greater than harmonic generation, that can be seen from metal tunnel junctions that we believe is due to light-induced inelastic tunneling emission. Like inelastic tunneling light emission, which was recently reported to have 2% conversion efficiency per tunneling event, the emission wavelength recorded varies with the local electric field applied; however, here the field is from a 1560 nm femtosecond pulsed laser source. Finite-difference time-domain simulations of the experimental conditions show the local field is sufficient to generate tunneling-based inelastic light emission in the visible regime. This phenomenon is promising for producing ultrafast upconverted light emission with higher efficiency than conventional nonlinear processes.
ISSN:1094-4087
1094-4087
DOI:10.1364/OE.390130