The recent surface plasmon entanglement experiment [Nature (London) 418, 304 (2002)]] is theoretically analyzed. The entanglement preservation upon transmission in the nonfocused case is found to provide information about the interaction of the biphoton and the metallic film. The entanglement degradation in the focused case is explained in the framework of a fully multimode model. This phenomenon is a consequence of the polarization-selective filtering behavior of the metallic nanostructured film. It is shown that the "which-way" labels that degrade entanglement are not located in the degrees of freedom of the metallic film but rather in the spatial degrees of freedom of the photon field.
The recent surface plasmon entanglement experiment [Nature (London) 418, 304 (2002)]] is theoretically analyzed. The entanglement preservation upon transmission in the nonfocused case is found to provide information about the interaction of the biphoton and the metallic film. The entanglement degradation in the focused case is explained in the framework of a fully multimode model. This phenomenon is a consequence of the polarization-selective filtering behavior of the metallic nanostructured film. It is shown that the "which-way" labels that degrade entanglement are not located in the degrees of freedom of the metallic film but rather in the spatial degrees of freedom of the photon field.
We report on experimental evidence of the preservation of the energy-time entanglement of a pair of photons after a photon-plasmon-photon conversion. This preservation is observed in two different plasmon conversion experiments, namely, extraordinary optical transmission through subwavelength metallic hole arrays and long range surface plasmon propagation in metallic waveguides. Plasmons are shown to coherently exist at two different times separated by much more than their lifetimes. This kind of entanglement involving light and matter is expected to be useful for future processing and storing of quantum information.
Two-photon states emitted from spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC) can exhibit quantum correlations in various degrees of freedom. On the other hand, plasmonic nanostructures show enhanced transmission thanks to the conversion of light into surface plasmon polaritons. It has been shown previously that polarization, time-energy and orbital angular momentum entanglement are preserved in such structures. The fact that surface plasmons are collective charge density waves, consisting of billions of electrons makes this observation remarkable. Here we show that spatial entanglement is also preserved by characterizing it after the photons interacted with gold nanopillar arrays. The detection is realized with novel single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) arrays with high spatial and temporal resolution. By measuring the spatial correlations of the photon in the near- and far-fields, we can characterize the state with respect to spatial entanglement with and without the nano-structure.
We present an experimental evidence that high-dimensional orbital angular-momentum entanglement of a pair of photons can be survived after a photon-plasmon-photon conversion. The information of spatial modes can be coherently transmitted by surface plasmons. This experiment primarily studies the high-dimensional entangled systems based on surface plasmon with subwavelength structures. It maybe useful in the investigation of spatial-mode properties of surface plasmon-assisted transmission through subwavelength hole arrays.
We experimentally study two-photon coherence in plasmon-assisted transmission with a two-photon Mach-Zehnder (MZ) interferometer. Two collinear photons of identical or orthogonal polarization are simultaneously incident on one optically thick metal film, perforated with a periodic array of subwavelength holes. The de Broglie wavelength of plasmon-assisted transmitted photons is measured, which shows that two photons are re-eradiated by the plasmons and the quantum coherence of biphoton is preserved in the conversion process of transforming biphoton to plasmons and then back to biphoton.
In the field of quantum information and quantum computing, entanglement plays an essential role. Entanglement preservation is an important issue as realistic quantum systems are affected by decoherence and entanglement losses due to the interaction with their environment. For example, in spite of an exponential decay of a single qubit, the entanglement between two qubits may completely disappear at a finite time; a phenomenon known as “entanglement sudden death” [1]. Recently, interest has been given in cases that qubits can be strongly coupled to plasmonic nanostructures, like, for example, an one-dimensional plasmonic waveguide [2] or a two-dimensional lattice of metal-coated dielectric nanoparticles [3]. In such systems the strong interaction with the surface plasmons leads to significant entanglement between the two qubits. Here, we consider the interaction of two initially entangled qubits interacting individually with a two-dimensional lattice of metal-coated dielectric nanoparticles. We consider two cases for the qubits, a pair of regular two-level systems and a pair of V-type systems where one transition is the qubit and the other level acts as an umbrella level [4]. We consider the entanglement dynamics for different initial conditions of the qubits. The specific plasmonic nanostructure leads to strongly modified spontaneous emission rates of individual quantum systems (strong suppression in certain cases) and, in addition, to strongly anisotropic Purcell effect for orthogonal dipoles, that in turn can be used for simulating quantum interference in spontaneous emission [5]. We use these effects for significantly prolonging entanglement dynamics near the plasmonic nanostructure in both cases, in comparison to the cases that the qubits are in free space. 1. T. Yu and J. H. Eberly, Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 140404 (2004). 2. A. Gonzalez-Tudela, D. Martin-Cano, E. Moreno, L. Martin-Moreno, C. Tejedor, and F. J. Garcia-Vidal, Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 020501 (2011). 3. N. Iliopoulos, A. F. Terzis, V. Yannopapas, and E. Paspalakis, Ann. Phys. 365, 38 (2016). 4. S. Das and G. S. Agarwal, Phys. Rev. A 81, 052341 (2010). 5. V. Yannopapas, E. Paspalakis, and N. V. Vitanov, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 063602 (2009).
Surface plasma waves arise from the collective oscillations of billions of electrons at the surface of a metal in unison. The simplest way to quantize these waves is by direct analogy to electromagnetic fields in free space, with the surface plasmon, the quantum of the surface plasma wave, playing the same role as the photon. It follows that surface plasmons should exhibit all of the same quantum phenomena that photons do, including quantum interference and entanglement. Unlike photons, however, surface plasmons suffer strong losses that arise from the scattering of free electrons from other electrons, phonons, and surfaces. Under some circumstances, these interactions might also cause “pure dephasing,” which entails a loss of coherence without absorption. Quantum descriptions of plasmons usually do not account for these effects explicitly, and sometimes ignore them altogether. In light of this extra microscopic complexity, it is necessary for experiments to test quantum models of surface plasmons. In this thesis, I describe two such tests that my collaborators and I performed. The first was a plasmonic version of the Hong-Ou-Mandel experiment, in which we observed two-particle quantum interference between plasmons with a visibility of 93 ± 1%. This measurement confirms that surface plasmons faithfully reproduce this effect with the same visibility and mutual coherence time, to within measurement error, as in the photonic case. The second experiment demonstrated path entanglement between surface plasmons with a visibility of 95 ± 2%, confirming that a path-entangled state can indeed survive without measurable decoherence. This measurement suggests that elastic scattering mechanisms of the type that might cause pure dephasing must have been weak enough not to significantly perturb the state of the metal under the experimental conditions we investigated. These two experiments add quantum interference and path entanglement to a growing list of quantum phenomena that surface plasmons appear to exhibit just as clearly as photons, confirming the predictions of the simplest quantum models.