Turning Forbidden Transitions into Dominant Transitions

Surface phonon polaritons are hybrid modes of photons and optical phonons that can propagate on the surface of a polar dielectric. In this work, we show that the precise combination of confinement and bandwidth offered by surface phonon polaritons allows for the ability to take forbidden transitions and turn them into the primary means by which an electron emits light. We show that high-order multipolar transitions and two-photon emission processes can be over an order of magnitude faster than competing dipole transitions, as opposed to being as much as eight to ten orders of magnitude slower in free space. Our results have direct implications for the design of fundamentally new types of emitters in the mid and far IR: ones which prefer to change their angular momentum by large amounts and also ones that prefer to emit a relatively broad spectrum of entangled photons - potentially allowing for new sources of both single and multiple photons.