Single-photon excitation of surface plasmon polaritons.
We provide the quantum-mechanical description of the excitation of surface plasmon polaritons on metal surfaces by single photons. An attenuated-reflection setup is described for the quantum excitation process in which we find remarkably efficient photon-to-surface plasmon wave-packet transfer. Using a fully quantized treatment of the fields, we introduce the Hamiltonian for their interaction and study the quantum statistics during transfer with and without losses in the metal.
Tame
M S
MS
School of Mathematics and Physics, Queen's University, Belfast BT7 1NN, United Kingdom.
Lee
C
C
Lee
J
J
Ballester
D
D
Paternostro
M
M
Zayats
A V
AV
Kim
M S
MS