Spontaneous Emission Control in a Tunable Hybrid Photonic System

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. Because of 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.