Dynamical Casimir effect for surface plasmon polaritons

Abstract

Emission of photon pairs by an interface of asymmetric dielectric and thin metal film excited by a normally falling plane wave is considered. The excitation causes oscillations in time of the phase velocity of surface plasmon polaritons in the interface. This leads to the dynamical Casimir effect - the generation of pairs of surface plasmon polariton quanta, which transfer to photons outside the interface. In case of a properly chosen interface, the yield of two-photon emission may exceed that of usual spontaneous parametric down conversion.

References in corpus (3)

• Absolute emission rates of Spontaneous Parametric Down Conversion into single transverse Gaussian modes
• Strong two-photon emission by a medium with periodically time-dependent refractive index
• Spontaneous down conversion in metal-dielectric interface - a possible source of polarization-entangled photons