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Tim Hebenstreit

Publications and source records attributed to Tim Hebenstreit.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Designing metallo-dielectric antennas for cryogenic applications

We present the design of cryogenic metallo-dielectric antennas tailored to single organic emitters, where the choice of host material imposes specific constraints on the antenna geometry. Using dibenzoterrylene (DBT) in para-dichlorobenzene (p-DCB}) as a model system, we show that photon collection efficiencies exceeding 90% can be achieved for arbitrary dipole orientations of the fluorescent molecule. The antenna design is intrinsically broadband and tolerant to emitter positioning within the structure. We further provide concrete fabrication guidelines for the full antenna architecture, and experimentally demonstrate its operating principle by recording a back-focal-plane image (BFP) of a single molecule inside a fabricated antenna.

physics.optics

Design of monolithic microcavities for enhancing organic quantum emitters

Single organic molecules are a well-established platform for high-quality single-photon generation: they can emit lifetime-limited photons with high purity and indistinguishability. However, their emission is accompanied by a pronounced red-shifted phonon sideband and higher-order vibrational peaks, which reduce the fraction of photons emitted into the desired narrowband zero-phonon line. The standard approach to suppressing this unwanted emission is to integrate the emitter into a monolithic photonic nanostructure that provides Purcell enhancement. However, incorporating organic materials using clean-room techniques has proven challenging, and has in fact so far prevented their integration into monolithic microcavities altogether. As a result, efficient, narrowband organic single-photon sources for applications in quantum information processing have remained elusive despite their considerable promise. Here, we propose three monolithic microcavity designs tailored to provide sufficient Purcell enhancement for organic quantum emitters. The Purcell effect induced by these cavities preferentially enhances emission into the 0-0 zero-phonon line, increasing spectral purity, photon extraction, and shortening the excited-state lifetime, which in turn relaxes the requirements for generating indistinguishable photons. The cavities have been optimized using Bayesian optimization and the adaptive Antoulas-Anderson (AAA) algorithm for rational approximation, which offer global optimization and the efficient reconstruction of spectra from scattering simulations, respectively. These structures are compatible with both standard clean-room processing and single-molecule preparation techniques. Therefore, they offer a clear route to realize high-quality, practically monochromatic organic single-photon light sources.

quant-ph

Benchmarking quantum key distribution by mixing single photons and laser light

Quantum key distribution is a key application of quantum mechanics, shaping the future of privacy and secure communications. Many protocols require single photons, often approximated by strongly attenuated laser pulses. Here, we harness the emission of a quantum dot embedded in a micropillar and explore a hybrid approach where the information is encoded on a mixture of single photons and laser pulses. We derive a phenomenological analysis of the configuration where both sources of light are mixed incoherently to perform the BB84 protocol, showing nearly perfect matching between theory and experiment. This provides a flexible technology compensating limited collected brightnesses of single-photon sources as well as a thorough investigation of single-photon statistics advantage scenarios over Poisson-distributed statistics. Explicitly, our model highlights an efficiency threshold for unconditional advantage of single photons over laser along with insights on the interplay between single-photon purity and collected brightness in the performances of BB84.

quant-ph