Taming plasmonic nanocavities for subradiant entanglement

Abstract

Recent rapid advances in quantum nanoplasmonics offer the potential for accessing quantum phenomena at room temperature. Despite this, entangled states have not yet been realised, and remain an outstanding challenge. In this work, we demonstrate how entanglement emerges in plasmonic nanocavities, which are inherently multi-mode, and demonstrate the conditions necessary for entanglement to persist. We find that, in general, these conditions are broken due to coupling with multiple plasmonic modes of different parity. We address this challenge with a new nanocavity design that supports high selective coupling to a single mode, enabling the robust generation of subradiant entanglement in nanoplasmonics. Our results open exciting prospects for leveraging simple plasmonic setups in ambient conditions for applications in quantum communication, sensing and rapid quantum memories.