Electrically-driven optical antennas

Unlike radiowave antennas, optical nanoantennas so far cannot be fed by electrical generators. Instead, they are driven by light or via optically active materials in their proximity. Here, we demonstrate direct electrical driving of an optical nanoantenna featuring an atomic-scale feed gap. Upon applying a voltage, quantum tunneling of electrons across the feed gap creates broadband quantum shot noise. Its optical frequency components are efficiently converted into photons by the antenna. We demonstrate that the properties of the emitted photons are fully controlled by the antenna architecture, and that the antenna improves the quantum efficiency by up to two orders of magnitude with respect to a non-resonant reference system. Our work represents a new paradigm for interfacing electrons and photons at the nanometer scale, e.g. for on-chip wireless data communication, electrically driven single- and multiphoton sources, as well as for background-free linear and nonlinear spectroscopy and sensing with nanometer resolution.