Single-Photon Excitation of Surface Plasmon Polaritons

Abstract

We provide the quantum-mechanical description of the excitation of surface plasmon polaritons on metal surfaces by single photons. An attenuated-reflection setup is described for the quantum excitation process in which we find remarkably efficient photon-to-surface plasmon wave-packet transfer. Using a fully quantized treatment of the fields, we introduce the Hamiltonian for their interaction and study the quantum statistics during transfer with and without losses in the metal.

Plasmonic circuits for manipulating optical information

“…At the quantum limit, there have been experimental demonstrations of the excitation of surface plasmons by single photon emitters. Importantly, these experiments reveal that the radiative decay of a plasmon excited by a single photon also yields a single photon, even though a surface plasmon is a collective phenomenon consisting of the in-phase oscillations of a large number of electrons [54][55][56][57][58]. Active plasmonic devices including those with gain have been reviewed elsewhere [59].…”

Quantum Plasmonics: From Quantum Statistics to Quantum Interferences

“…Indeed, such a change is well known when light-matter scattering and absorption processes are involved [71]. Taking a simple linear loss model with uncorrelated Markovian noise 1 , we expect that for number states |n , the quantum observables that make up g (2) transform the numerator of eq 4.1 as n(n − 1) → η 2 n(n − 1) and the denominator as n → ηn, where η is the total loss over the length of the waveguide [83]. Thus, for this particular loss model, the second-order quantum coherence should remain unchanged.…”

Quantum plasmonic excitation in graphene and loss-insensitive propagation

“…Using the relationb(t) = (2π) −1/2 dωe −iωtb (ω), the mean SPP flux at space-time coordinate (x, t) can be calculated, f out (x, t) = b † out (x, t)b out (x, t) . For a narrow wavepacket centered at ω 0 , we have [42] …”