Single-photon tunneling via localized surface plasmons.
Strong evidence of a single-photon tunneling effect, a direct analog of single-electron tunneling, has been obtained in the measurements of light tunneling through individual subwavelength pinholes in a gold film covered with a layer of polydiacetylene. The transmission of some pinholes reached saturation because of the optical nonlinearity of polydiacetylene at a very low light intensity of a few thousand photons per second. This result is explained theoretically in terms of a "photon blockade," similar to the Coulomb blockade phenomenon observed in single-electron tunneling experiments. Single-photon tunneling may find applications in the fields of quantum communication and information processing.
Smolyaninov
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II
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
Zayats
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AV
Gungor
A
A
Davis
C C
CC