Single-photon excitation of surface plasmon polaritons

Abstract

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.