Directional Local Density of States of Classical and Quantum Propagating Surface Plasmons

Abstract

International audienc

Description of spontaneous photon emission and local density of states in the presence of a lossy polaritonic inhomogeneous medium

“…The present work justifies semi-classical results [2,3,72] and alternative quantum approaches based on the Langevin's noise method [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] which neglected the role of photon vacuum. We think that the present work will motivate further studies in order to analyze other regimes of coupling between emitters and dielectric media and will impact our description of quantum polaritonic an plasmonic physics in the quantum regime (e.g., with near-field optical microscopes involving singlephoton emitters [6,7,[73][74][75].…”

“…In the recent years the theoretical problem of describing the coupling of single fluorescent quantum emitters with a metallic nano-particle supporting surface plasmon (SP) modes has become very urgent due to many applications envisioned with photonic and quantum information processing technologies at the nanoscale. In particular the concept of local density of states (LDOS) [1,2] is central since it provides a figure a merit for quantifying the coupling of quantum emitters to plasmonic systems and it plays a central role in recent studies using nearfield optical microscopes [1,[3][4][5][6][7]. However, one of the main issue with plasmonic systems is that they are intrinsically dissipative and that a self-consistent quantum electrodynamics (QED) description of plasmons, i.e.…”

“…7) can be rewritten as−e i E 1 t G(0)|( Ē(0) + PΨ (0))|I(t) ≃ G(0)|( Ē(t)+ PΨ (t))|I(0)since the quantum state |G(0) corresponds to the eigenvalue σ z = −1. Regrouping the terms we finally get the dynamical equation d dt S(t) = −iω 21 S(t)…”

Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscope Combined with Digital Holography for Three-Dimensional Electromagnetic Field Reconstruction

“…It is important to mention here that the excitation of surface plasmons can also be performed by other techniques such as exciting surface defects [6,17], pointlike dipoles [18], and tunneling electrons [19,20], in addition to classical techniques such as prism or grating couplers. The far-field radiation pattern of leaky surface plasmons launched on metallic thin films by NSOM tips was previously studied using conventional back focal plane imaging techniques [17,21,22]. In such techniques, the intensity of the EM field is accurately measured in the Fourier plane of an optical system [23,24].…”

Equivalence between the Hamiltonian and Langevin noise descriptions of plasmon polaritons in a dispersive and lossy inhomogeneous medium

“…One of the central issue in this field is the control over the coupling between fluorescent quantum emitters and nano-antennas or compact plasmonic devices [3,4]. Experimentally, many key results have been obtained in the last decade thank to the development of methods like active probe near-field optical microscopy [5,6], and to rapid progress in nanofabrication technics and particle synthesis [8][9][10][11][12][13].…”