Orchestrating Spontaneous Emission With Metasurfaces- Recent Advances in Engineering Thermal, Luminescent, and Quantum Emissions
Published in Advanced Optical Materials (Invited), 2025
Abstract:
Metasurfaces have emerged as powerful tools for controlling spontaneous emission, offering unprecedented control over light–matter interactions at sub-wavelength scales. While metasurfaces are traditionally utilized for shaping coherent electromagnetic waves, they have recently extended their capabilities to control incoherent or spontaneous emission. This review examines how metasurfaces can enhance and precisely control properties of thermal, luminescent, and quantum emission. In thermal emission, metasurfaces enable control over spatial, temporal, and spin coherence, offering new possibilities for applications such as energy harvesting, radiative cooling, and heat-assisted ranging and detection. For luminescent emission, metasurfaces significantly improve emission rates, quantum efficiency, and directionality, driving innovations in lighting and display technologies. For controlling quantized emission, metasurfaces provide routes to tailor single-photon sources and entangled-photon generation for quantum information technologies. These advances underscore the transformative potential of metasurfaces in orchestrating spontaneous emission across diverse regimes.