Long-range surface plasmon polariton excitation at the quantum level

摘要

We provide the quantum mechanical description of the excitation of long-rangesurface plasmon polaritons (LRSPPs) on thin metallic strips. The excitationprocess consists of an attenuated-reflection setup, where efficientphoton-to-LRSPP wavepacket-transfer is shown to be achievable. For calculatingthe coupling, we derive the first quantization of LRSPPs in the polaritonicregime. We study quantum statistics during propagation and characterize theperformance of photon-to-LRSPP quantum state transfer for single-photons,photon-number states and photonic coherent superposition states.