Controllable spontaneous decay at material wedges

We show that the de-excitation process of a dipole emitter can be altered controllably when it is embedded in a dielectric wedge of an arbitrary angle 0<ϕ0⩽2π. We focus here on the case of a dielectric wedge bounded by a perfect conductor and show that the de-excitation process for different wedges, distinguished by ϕ0, displays a wide range of features. Besides the dependence on the emitter location at the narrow end, the de-excitation process exhibits a strong dipole orientational dependence, suggesting that the system might serve as a qubit in a controllable scalable hardware architecture for the purpose of quantum information processing.