Broadband Purcell effect: Radiative decay engineering with metamaterials

We show that metamaterials with hyperbolic dispersion support a large number of electromagnetic states that can couple to quantum emitters leading to a broadband Purcell effect. The proposed approach of radiative decay engineering, useful for applications such as single photon sources, fluorescence imaging, biosensing, and single molecule detection, also opens up the possibility of using hyperbolic metamaterials to probe the spontaneous emission properties of atoms and artificial atoms such as quantum dots. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4710548]