Engineering Quantum Emission with Mie Voids

Abstract: Spontaneous emission, as a fundamental radiative process and a versatile information carrier, plays a vital role in light-emitting devices, optical information modulation and encryption, super-resolution fluorescence imaging and nano sensing. Engineering the photonic environment surrounding quantum emitters can enhance their emission characteristics. However, simultaneously achieving precise control over both excitation enhancement and quantum-yield modulation at the nanoscale remains elusive, highlighting substantial room for advancing the precised engineering of quantum emission. Here, we introduce silicon Mie voids - air-defined cavities that invert the conventional solid-particle geometry - to achieve independent tuning of quantum emission within an individual subwavelength structure, while minimizing optical losses. Full-wave simulations and experiments on both gradient and uniform Mie-void arrays jointly validate this quantitative framework for emission tuning, which disentangles excitation enhancement arising from local field confinement in air and quantum-yield enhancement resulting from strengthened emitter-resonator coupling, while confirming the accelerated radiative decay enabled by the void configuration. Leveraging this flexible mechanism, we realize a bimodal nanophotonic pattern with near-diffraction-limited pixels that encode the EPFL logo in the bright field and the SJTU logo in both dark field and photoluminescence micrographs. These results establish Mie voids as a powerful platform for programmable, high-density multimodal displays and open new avenues for advancing state-of-the-art nanophotonic devices.