Probing decoherence in plasmonic waveguides in the quantum regime
arXiv:1705.10344 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevApplied.9.024003
Abstract
We experimentally investigate the decoherence of single surface plasmon polaritons in metal stripe waveguides. In our study we use a Mach-Zehnder configuration previously considered for measuring decoherence in atomic, electronic and photonic systems. By placing waveguides of different length in one arm we are able to measure the amplitude damping time T_1 = 1.90 +/- 0.01 x 10^-14 s, pure phase damping time T_2^* = 11.19 +/- 4.89 x 10^-14 s and total phase damping time T_2 = 2.83 +/- 0.32 x 10^-14 s. We find that decoherence is mainly due to amplitude damping and thus loss arising from inelastic electron and photon scattering plays the most important role in the decoherence of plasmonic waveguides in the quantum regime. However, pure phase damping is not completely negligible. The results will be useful in the design of plasmonic waveguide systems for carrying out phase-sensitive quantum applications, such as quantum sensing. The probing techniques developed may also be applied to other plasmonic nanostructures, such as those used as nanoantennas, as unit cells in metamaterials and as nanotraps for cold atoms.
9 pages, 3 figures
References in corpus (13)
- Quantum Computing
- Photonic quantum technologies
- Atom Interferometers
- Controlled coupling of a single nitrogen-vacancy center to a silver nanowire
- Direct measurement of the coherence length of edge states in the Integer Quantum Hall Regime
- Delayed-choice test of complementarity with single photons
- Coalescence and anti-coalescence of surface plasmons on a lossy beamsplitter
- Single-photon excitation of surface plasmon polaritons
- `Deterministic' quantum plasmonics
- Quantum noise reduction in intensity-sensitive surface plasmon resonance sensors
- Experimental verification of entanglement generated in a plasmonic system
- Dephasing by electron-electron interactions in a ballistic Mach-Zehnder interferometer
- Quantum random number generation using an on-chip plasmonic beamsplitter