Single-Photon Emission Mediated by Single-Electron Tunneling in Plasmonic Nanojunctions.

Recent scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) experiments reported single-molecule fluorescence induced by tunneling currents in the nanoplasmonic cavity formed by the STM tip and the substrate. The electric field of the cavity mode couples with the current-induced charge fluctuations of the molecule, allowing the excitation of photons. We investigate theoretically this system for the experimentally relevant limit of large damping rate κ for the cavity mode and arbitrary coupling strength to a single-electronic level. We find that for bias voltages close to the first inelastic threshold of photon emission, the emitted light displays antibunching behavior with vanishing second-order photon correlation function. At the same time, the current and the intensity of emitted light display Franck-Condon steps at multiples of the cavity frequency ω_{c} with a width controlled by κ rather than the temperature T. For large bias voltages, we predict strong photon bunching of the order of κ/Γ where Γ is the electronic tunneling rate. Our theory thus predicts that strong coupling to a single level allows current-driven nonclassical light emission.

Mechanical Signatures of the Current Blockade Instability in Suspended Carbon Nanotubes.

Transport measurements allow sensitive detection of nanomechanical motion of suspended carbon nanotubes. It has been predicted that when the electromechanical coupling is sufficiently large a bistability with a current blockade appears. Unambiguous observation of this transition by current measurements may be difficult. Instead, we investigate the mechanical response of the system, namely, the displacement spectral function, the linear response to a driving, and the ring-down behavior. We find that by increasing the electromechanical coupling the peak in the spectral function broadens and shifts at low frequencies while the oscillator dephasing time shortens. These effects are maximum at the transition where nonlinearities dominate the dynamics. These strong signatures open the way to detect the blockade transition in devices currently studied by several groups.

Andreev bound-state dynamics in quantum-dot Josephson junctions: a washing out of the 0-π transition.

We consider a Josephson junction formed by a quantum dot connected to two bulk superconductors in the presence of Coulomb interaction and coupling to both an electromagnetic environment and a finite density of electronic quasiparticles. In the limit of a large superconducting gap we obtain a Born-Markov description of the relevant Andreev bound-states dynamics. We calculate the current-phase relation and we find that the experimentally unavoidable presence of quasiparticles can dramatically modify the 0-π standard transition picture. We show that photon-assisted quasiparticle absorption allows the dynamic switching from the 0 to the π state and vice versa, washing out the 0-π transition predicted by purely thermodynamic arguments. Spectroscopic signatures of Andreev bound-states broadening are investigated by considering microwave irradiation.

Unified description of charge transfer mechanisms and vibronic dynamics in nanoscale junctions.

We propose a general framework that unifies the description of counting statistics of transmitted (fermionic) charges as it is commonly used in the quantum transport community with the description of counting statistics of phonons (bosons). As a particular example, we study on the same footing the counting statistics of electrons transferred through a molecular junction and the corresponding population dynamics of the associated molecular vibrational mode. In the tunnel limit, non-perturbative results in the electron-phonon interaction are derived that unify complementary approaches based on rate equations or on the use of non-equilibrium Green functions.

Aharonov-Bohm conductance modulation in ballistic carbon nanotubes.

We report on magnetoconductance experiments in ballistic multiwalled carbon nanotubes threaded by magnetic fields as large as 55 T. In the high temperature regime (100 K), giant modulations of the conductance, mediated by the Fermi level location, are unveiled. The experimental data are consistently analyzed in terms of the field-dependent density of states of the external shell that modulates the injection properties at the electrode-nanotube interface, and the resulting linear conductance. This is the first unambiguous experimental evidence of Aharonov-Bohm effect in clean multiwalled carbon nanotubes.