Testbeds for Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Photonics: Efficacy of Light Emission Enhancement in Monomer vs. Dimer Nanoscale Antennae

Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides are uniquely-qualified materials for photonics because they combine well defined tunable direct band gaps and selfpassivated surfaces without dangling bonds. However, the atomic thickness of these 2D materials results in low photo absorption limiting the achievable photo luminescence intensity. Such emission can, in principle, be enhanced via nanoscale antennae resulting in; a. an increased absorption cross-section enhancing pump efficiency, b. an acceleration of the internal emission rate via the Purcell factor mainly by reducing the antennas optical mode volume beyond the diffraction limit, and c. improved impedance matching of the emitter dipole to the freespace wavelength. Plasmonic dimer antennae show orders of magnitude hot-spot field enhancements when an emitter is positioned exactly at the midgap. However, a 2D material cannot be grown, or easily transferred, to reside in mid-gap of the metallic dimer cavity. In addition, a spacer layer between the cavity and the emissive material is required to avoid non-radiative recombination channels. Using both computational and experimental methods, in this work we show that the emission enhancement from a 2D emitter- monomer antenna cavity system rivals that of dimers at much reduced lithographic effort. We rationalize this finding by showing that the emission enhancement in dimer antennae does not specifically originate from the gap of the dimer cavity, but is an average effect originating from the effective cavity crosssection taken below each optical cavity where the emitting 2D film is located. In particular, we test an array of different dimer and monomer antenna geometries and observe a representative 3x higher emission for both monomer and dimer cavities as compared to intrinsic emission of Chemical Vapor Deposition synthesized WS2 flakes.