Exciton harvesting is demonstrated in an ensemble of quantum emitters coupled to localized surface plasmons. When the interaction between emitters and the dipole mode of a metallic nanosphere reaches the strong-coupling regime, the exciton conductance is greatly increased. The spatial map of the conductance matches the plasmon field intensity profile, which indicates that transport properties can be tuned by adequately tailoring the field of the plasmonic resonance. Under strong coupling, we find that pure dephasing can have detrimental or beneficial effects on the conductance, depending on the effective number of participating emitters. Finally, we show that the exciton transport in the strong-coupling regime occurs on an ultrafast time scale given by the inverse Rabi splitting ($\sim 10$ fs), which is orders of magnitude faster than transport through direct hopping between the emitters.

• Received 17 February 2015
• Revised 25 August 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.92.121402