Analysis and Design of Novel Nanophotonic Structures

Nanophotonic devices hold promise to revolutionize the fields of optical communications, quantum computing and bioimaging. Designing viable solutions to these pressing problems require developing accurate models of the relevant systems. While a great deal of work has been performed in terms of developing individual models with varying levels of fidelity, some of these more complex systems still require improved links between scales to allow for accurate design and optimization within a reasonable amount of computing time. For instance, color centers in nanocrystals appear to be a promising platform for room-temperature scalable quantum information science, but questions still remain about the optimal structures to control single-photon emitter rates, coupling fidelity, and suitable scaling architectures. In this work, a method for efficient optical access and readout of nanocrystal states via magnetic transitions was demonstrated. Separately novel Mie resonant devices that guarantee on-demand enhancement of emission from the single vacancy sources were shown. To improve addressability of the crystal-based impurities, a new approach for realization of single photon electro-optical devices is also proposed in this work. Furthermore, this work on color centers in nanocrystals has been shown to be sensitive to the local refractive index environment. This allows this system to be adapted to biomedical applications, such as sensitive, minimally invasive cancer detection. In this work, a novel scheme for propagation loss-free sensing of local refractive index using nanocrystal probes with broken symmetry is carefully investigated. In conclusion, this thesis develops several novel simulation and optimization techniques that combine existing nanophotonic modeling tools into a unique multi-scale modeling tool. It has been successfully applied to nanophotonically-tuned color vacancy centers. Potential applications span optical communications, quantum information processing, and biomedical sensing.