Molding Photon Emission with Hybrid Plasmon-Emitter Coupled Metasurfaces

TL;DR

This paper presents a holography-based design method for creating hybrid plasmon-emitter metasurfaces that efficiently produce directional, polarized single-photon emission for quantum information applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel holography-inspired approach to design nanostructures for controlling photon emission direction and polarization in hybrid plasmon-emitter systems.

Findings

Demonstrated generation of various polarized photons propagating in specific directions.

Validated the efficiency and versatility of the holography-based design approach.

Extended the potential for complex quantum photonic system development.

Abstract

Directional emission of photons with designed polarizations and orbital angular momenta is crucial for exploiting full potential of quantum emitters (QEs) within quantum information technologies. Capitalizing on the concept of hybrid plasmon-QE coupled metasurfaces, we develop a holography-based design approach allowing one to construct surface nanostructures for outcoupling QE-excited circularly diverging surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) into well-collimated beams of photons with desirable polarization characteristics propagating along given directions. Using the well-established simulation framework, we demonstrate the efficiency and versatility of the developed approach by analyzing different hybrid SPP-QE coupled metasurfaces designed for generation of linearly, radially and circularly polarized photons propagating in various off-axis directions. Our work enables the design of single-photon sources with radiation channels that have distinct directional and polarization characteristics, extending thereby possibilities for designing complex photonic systems for quantum information processing. Moreover, we believe that the developed scattering holography approach is generally useful when employing surface electromagnetic excitations, including SPP modes, as reference waves for signal wave reconstruction.