Suppressed dissipation of a quantum emitter coupled to surface plasmon polaritons

TL;DR

This paper investigates the dissipative dynamics of a quantum emitter coupled to surface plasmon polaritons, revealing that a bound state can suppress dissipation and stabilize the emitter's excited state even in lossy environments.

Contribution

It demonstrates the formation of a QE-SPP bound state that leads to suppressed dissipation, offering new insights into quantum emitter interactions with plasmonic structures.

Findings

Quantum emitter can be partially stabilized in excited state despite metal losses.

Formation of QE-SPP bound state causes suppressed dissipation.

Results enhance understanding of QE-SPP interactions in quantum devices.

Abstract

Enabling the confinement of light to a scale far below the one of conventional optics, surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) induced by an electromagnetic field in a metal-dielectric interface supply an ideal system to explore strong quantized light-matter coupling. The fast matter-SPP population exchange reported in previous works makes it a candidate for spin manipulation, but such reversible dynamics asymptotically vanishes accompanying the quantum matter relaxing completely to its ground state. Here, we study the exact dissipative dynamics of a quantum emitter (QE) coupled to SPPs. It is interesting to find that, qualitatively different from conventional findings, the QE can be partially stabilized in its excited state even in the presence of the lossy metal. Our analysis reveals that it is the formation of a QE-SPP bound state which results in such suppressed dissipation. Enriching the decoherence dynamics of the QE in the lossy medium, our result is helpful to understand QE-SPP interactions and apply plasmonic nanostructures in quantum devices.