Non-secular polariton leakage and dark-state protection in hybrid plasmonic cavities

TL;DR

This paper develops a master equation approach for plasmonic cavities that captures non-secular effects, revealing new phenomena like dark polariton stabilization and providing design criteria for nanophotonic devices.

Contribution

It introduces a time-local master equation that includes non-secular interference effects, advancing the understanding of polariton dynamics in open plasmonic systems.

Findings

Order-one deviations from secular leakage dynamics

Bath-induced coherences and dark polariton stabilization

Design criterion based on polariton splitting to reservoir linewidth ratio

Abstract

A major issue in exploiting plasmonic cavities as key components in nanotechnology is the effect of radiative and absorption losses on their electrodynamic behavior. Treating them as open-systems, we derive a time-local, completely positive master equation that retains non-secular interference between decay pathways and reduces to the standard secular description when the environment resolves polariton splitting. When it does not, the theory predicts order-one deviations from secular leakage dynamics, including bath-induced coherences and stabilization of dark polaritons, and provides a simple design criterion based on the ratio of polariton splitting to reservoir linewidth. A time-resolved leakage measurement, such as transmission, reflectivity, or photoluminescence, can be used to observe these effects.