Placing Quantum Dots in 3D Photonic Crystals and Finding Them Back

It is a major outstanding goal in Nanophotonics to precisely place quantum emitters inside a three-dimensional (3D) metamaterial. It is well-known that such control offers exquisite control over cavity QED, spontaneous and stimulated emission, and even non-linear optics [1]. Theory predicts that the emission of an emitter, e.g. a quantum dot, varies spatially on 100s nm scale [2]. Thus, the challenge is to place emitters with a precision better than Δx < 100 nm. We present our newly developed chemical toolbox to fix the positions of quantum dots with a polymer brush layer with thicknesses in the 10s nm range in silicon nanostructures [3].