Spontaneous emission in dielectric nanoparticles

An analytical expression is obtained for the radiative-decay rate of an excited optical center in an ellipsoidal dielectric nanoparticle (with sizes much less than the wavelength) surrounded by a dielectric medium. It is found that the ratio of the decay rate A _nano of an excited optical center in the nanoparticle to the decay rate A _bulk of an excited optical center in the bulk sample is independent of the local-field correction and, therefore, of the adopted local-field model. Moreover, the expression implies that the ratio A _nano/A _bulk for oblate and prolate ellipsoids depends strongly on the orientation of the dipole moment of the transition with respect to the ellipsoid axes. In the case of spherical nanoparticles, a formula relating the decay rate A _nano and the dielectric parameters of the nanocomposite and the volumetric content c of these particles in the nanocomposite is derived. This formula reduces to a known expression for spherical nanoparticles in the limit c ≪ 1, while the ratio A _nano/A _bulk approaches unity as c tends to unity. The analysis shows that the approach used in a number of papers {H. P. Christensen, D. R. Gabbe, and H. P. Jenssen, Phys. Rev. B 25, 1467 (1982); R. S. Meltzer, S. P. Feofilov, B. Tissue, and H. B. Yuan, Phys. Rev. B 60, R14012 (1999); R. I. Zakharchenya, A. A. Kaplyanskii, A. B. Kulinkin, et al., Fiz. Tverd. Tela 45, 2104 (2003) [Phys. Solid State 45, 2209 (2003)]; G. Manoj Kumar, D. Narayana Rao, and G. S. Agarwal, Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 203903 (2003); Chang-Kui Duan, Michael F. Reid, and Zhongqing Wang, Phys. Lett. A 343, 474 (2005); K. Dolgaleva, R. W. Boyd, and P. W. Milonni, J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 24, 516 (2007)}, for which the formula for A _nano is derived merely by substituting the bulk refractive index by the effective refractive index of the nanocomposite must be revised, because the resulting ratio A _nano/A _bulk turns out to depend on the local-field model. The formulas for the emission and absorption cross sections σ_nano for nanoparticles are derived. It is shown that the ratios σ_nano/σ_bulk and A _nano/A _bulk are not equal in general, which can be used to improve the lasing parameters. The experimentally determined and theoretically evaluated decay times of metastable states of dopant rare-earth ions in crystalline YAG and Y₂O₃ nanoparticles are compared with the corresponding values for bulk crystals of the same structure.