Nearfield control over magnetic light-matter interactions

Abstract

Light-matter interactions are frequently perceived as predominantly influenced by the electric field, with the magnetic component of light often overlooked. Nonetheless, the magnetic field plays a pivotal role in various optical processes, including chiral light-matter interactions, photon-avalanching, and forbidden photochemistry, underscoring the significance of manipulating magnetic processes in optical phenomena. Here, we explore the ability to control the magnetic light and matter interactions at the nanoscale. In particular, we demonstrate experimentally, using a plasmonic nanostructure, the transfer of energy from the magnetic nearfield to a nanoparticle, thanks to the subwavelength magnetic confinement allowed by our nano-antenna. This control is made possible by the particular design of our plasmonic nanostructure, which has been optimized to spatially decouple the electric and magnetic components of localized plasmonic fields. Furthermore, by studying the spontaneous emission from the Lanthanide-ions doped nanoparticle, we observe that the measured field distributions are not spatially correlated with the experimentally estimated electric and magnetic local densities of states of this antenna, in contradiction with what would be expected from reciprocity. We demonstrate that this counter-intuitive observation is, in fact, the result of the different optical paths followed by the excitation and emission of the ions, which forbids a direct application of the reciprocity theorem.