Orchestrating Spontaneous Emission With Metasurfaces: Recent Advances in Engineering Thermal, Luminescent, and Quantum Emissions

Abstract

Metasurfaces have emerged as powerful tools for controlling spontaneous emission, offering unprecedented control over light-matter interactions at sub-wavelength scales. While metasurfaces are traditionally utilized for shaping coherent electromagnetic waves, they have recently extended their capabilities to control incoherent or spontaneous emission. This examines review how metasurfaces can enhance and precisely control properties of thermal, luminescent, and quantum emission. In thermal emission, metasurfaces enable control over spatial, temporal, and spin coherence, offering new possibilities for applications such as energy harvesting, radiative cooling and heat assisted ranging and detection. For luminescent emission, metasurfaces significantly improve emission rates, quantum efficiency, and directionality, driving innovations in lighting and display technologies. For controlling quantized spontaneous emission, metasurfaces are instrumental in enhancing single-photon sources and enabling novel functionalities in quantum states through photon-pair generation, which is vital for quantum communication, meteorology, and computing. Despite these advancements several challenges to increase the operational bandwidths, accelerate and develop simulation strategies, and fabrication complexities persist. Emerging trends are also dicussed, such as dynamic metasurfaces and their integration with nanophotonic platforms, which could further expand the capabilities of light-emitting metasurfaces.