Single-photon excitation of surface plasmon polaritons

TL;DR

This paper presents a quantum mechanical analysis of how single photons can efficiently excite surface plasmon polaritons on metal surfaces, including a detailed Hamiltonian model and effects of metal losses.

Contribution

It introduces a fully quantized framework for photon-to-surface plasmon transfer and demonstrates high efficiency in the excitation process.

Findings

Efficient photon-to-surface plasmon wavepacket transfer demonstrated.

Quantum statistics of the transfer process analyzed with and without metal losses.

Hamiltonian formalism for the interaction provides a foundation for quantum plasmonics.

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 wavepacket-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.