We synthesize a thin film composed of long carbyne chains terminated by gold clusters and study its optical properties. The presence of gold particles stabilizes longer chains and leads to their alignment. We show that the gold clusters also act as a source of electron doping, thus, changing the intensity of photoluminescence from quadratic dependence on the pumping intensity without gold to linear with gold. We also observe that the excitation of the film at the gold plasmon frequency causes the blue shift of photoluminescence and estimate, on the basis of this effect, the minimum length of the carbyne chains. The high degree of alignment of the gold-terminated carbyne chains results in strongly anisotropic light absorption characterized by a distinctive cosine dependence on the angle between the carbyne molecule and polarization plane of the excitation. This paves the way for a new class of ultimately thin polarization sensitive emitters to be used in future integrated quantum photonics devices.

• Received 11 October 2023
• Revised 16 November 2023
• Accepted 15 December 2023

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.056902

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Published by the American Physical Society