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 wavepacket-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.
@article{arxiv.0809.1766,
title = {Single-photon excitation of surface plasmon polaritons},
author = {M. S. Tame and C. Lee and J. Lee and D. Ballester and M. Paternostro and A. V. Zayats and M. S. Kim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0809.1766},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 3 figures, RevTeX4; Accepted version (Phys. Rev. Lett.)