Quantum Statistics of Surface Plasmon Polaritons in Metallic Stripe Waveguides

Abstract

Heralded single surface plasmon polaritons are excited using photons generated via spontaneous parametric down conversion. The mean excitation rates, intensity correlations, and Fock state populations are studied. The observed dependence of the second-order coherence in our experiment is consistent with a linear uncorrelated Markovian environment in the quantum regime. Our results provide important information about the effect of loss for assessing the potential of plasmonic waveguides for future nanophotonic circuitry in the quantum regime.

Plasmonic hot carrier dynamics in solid-state and chemical systems for energy conversion

“…They enable efficient coupling of electromagnetic waves from free space to nanoscale systems [5][6][7][8][9], and have therefore found a broad range of applications, including spectroscopy, non-linear optics [10,11], photodetection [12][13][14][15], and solar energy harvesting [16,17]. Additionally, novel phenomena continue to be discovered in the field of plasmonics, such as quantum interference of plasmons [18][19][20], quantum coupling of plasmons to single-particle excitations, and quantum confinement of plasmons in single-nm scale plasmonic particles [21][22][23]. Experimental developments in quantum plasmonics have shown, remarkably, the ability of surface plasmons to preserve many key quantum mechanical properties of the photons used to excite them, notably entanglement, interferometry and sub-Poissonian statistics.…”

Quantum Plasmonics: From Quantum Statistics to Quantum Interferences

“…Our results [86] imply that building longer and more complex SPP waveguide structures operating in the quantum regime is realistic and opens up the possibility for future studies of new types of functioning devices based on quantum plasmonics, assessing the realistic potential of building plasmonic waveguides for nanophotonic circuitry that operates faithfully in the quantum regime.…”

“…In [86], additional details on the mathematical derivation of the tomographic method used to reconstruct the populations are provided.…”

Structure of the harmonic oscillator in the space of n-particle Glauber correlators

“…4 shows that there exist states such that n 0 > 1 and g (2) < 1/2 (with superpositions √ p |1 + (1 − p)e iθ |2 ) for 0 < p < 1 lying on the frontier). This is an important observation as it invalidates a popular criterion in the literature that uses g (2) < 1/2 as a criterion for single-particle states or, more frequently, single-photon emission [32][33][34][35][36][37]. Our map of the Hilbert space shows that the criterion g (2) < 1/2 is proper to identify states with less than two particles on average, not one, as is the usual requirement for secure quantum protocols.…”