English

Two-photon spontaneous emission in atomically thin plasmonic nanostructures

Optics 2020-08-26 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Quantum Physics

Abstract

The ability to harness light-matter interactions at the few-photon level plays a pivotal role in quantum technologies. Single photons - the most elementary states of light - can be generated on-demand in atomic and solid state emitters. Two-photon states are also key quantum assets, but achieving them in individual emitters is challenging because their generation rate is much slower than competing one-photon processes. We demonstrate that atomically thin plasmonic nanostructures can harness two-photon spontaneous emission, resulting in giant far-field two-photon production, a wealth of resonant modes enabling tailored photonic and plasmonic entangled states, and plasmon-assisted single-photon creation orders of magnitude more efficient than standard one-photon emission. We unravel the two-photon spontaneous emission channels and show that their spectral line-shapes emerge from an intricate interplay between Fano and Lorentzian resonances. Enhanced two-photon spontaneous emission in two-dimensional nanostructures paves the way to an alternative efficient source of light-matter entanglement for on-chip quantum information processing and free-space quantum communications.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.15219,
  title  = {Two-photon spontaneous emission in atomically thin plasmonic nanostructures},
  author = {Y. Muniz and A. Manjavacas and C. Farina and D. A. R. Dalvit and W. J. M. Kort-Kamp},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.15219},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

13 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:39:40.858Z