Long-range surface plasmon polariton excitation at the quantum level

TL;DR

This paper presents a quantum mechanical framework for exciting and transferring quantum states of long-range surface plasmon polaritons on thin metallic strips, enabling efficient photon-to-LRSPP quantum state transfer.

Contribution

It introduces the first quantization of LRSPPs in the polaritonic regime and analyzes quantum state transfer efficiency for various photon states.

Findings

Efficient photon-to-LRSPP wavepacket transfer demonstrated.

Quantum statistics during propagation characterized.

Performance of quantum state transfer analyzed for different photon states.

Abstract

We provide the quantum mechanical description of the excitation of long-range surface plasmon polaritons (LRSPPs) on thin metallic strips. The excitation process consists of an attenuated-reflection setup, where efficient photon-to-LRSPP wavepacket-transfer is shown to be achievable. For calculating the coupling, we derive the first quantization of LRSPPs in the polaritonic regime. We study quantum statistics during propagation and characterize the performance of photon-to-LRSPP quantum state transfer for single-photons, photon-number states and photonic coherent superposition states.