Experimental evidence of Förster energy transfer enhancement in the near field through engineered metamaterial surface waves

Plasmonics has been demonstrated to provide fine tuning of the emission properties of single quantum sources (brightness, polarization, directivity, spectrum, lifetime...). However, significantly less is known about the role of surface plasmons in mediating subwavelength Förster resonant energy transfer (FRET) when a second emitter is introduced. Here, we report microwave experiments showing that excitation of surface waves on a dedicated metasurface can strongly mediate FRET in the near-field regime. This work paves the way for metasurfaces engineered to control dipole-dipole energy transfer with applications in lighting sources, photovoltaics, quantum information processing and biophysics.

Kseniia Lezhennikova, Kaizad Rustomji, Boris T. Kuhlmey, Tryfon Antonakakis, Pierre Jomin, Stanislav Glybovski, C. Martijn de Sterke, Jérôme Wenger, Redha Abdeddaim, Stefan Enoch