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Nonclassical near-field dynamics of surface plasmons

Nature Physics (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The coupling of photons to collective charge oscillations at the surface of a metal to form surface-plasmon polaritons enables strong confinement of electromagnetic near fields in the vicinity of photonic nanostructures. Even though surface plasmons are formed from bosons and fermions, this kind of near-field wave exhibits bosonic properties in the limit of many electrons. Here we show that the classical near-field dynamics of surface plasmons are defined by nonclassical processes of scattering among their constituent multiparticle subsystems. We isolate multiparticle plasmonic subsystems to demonstrate that their quantum dynamics are governed by either bosonic or fermionic processes of coherence. We also discuss the quantum-coherence properties of plasmonic fields excited by the vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. Our findings uncover multiparticle properties of electromagnetic near fields with important implications for quantum technology.

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Fig. 1: Quantum near-field dynamics of plasmonic fields.
Fig. 2: Collective and multiparticle-subsystem dynamics of surface plasmons.
Fig. 3: Observation of bosonic- and fermionic-like processes of coherence in a plasmonic system.

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Data availability

Source data are available for this paper at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24964593. All other data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Code availability

The code used to analyse the data and the related simulation files are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

M.H., R.B.D., B.B. and O.S.M.L. acknowledge funding from the US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering under Award DE-SC0021069. C.Y. and O.S.M.L. acknowledge support from the Army Research Office (ARO), through the Early Career Program (ECP) under the grant no. W911NF-22-1-0088. We thank K. M. McPeak for providing gold thin films.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Mingyuan Hong, Riley B. Dawkins.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Quantum Photonics Laboratory, Department of Physics & Astronomy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    Mingyuan Hong, Riley B. Dawkins, Benjamin Bertoni, Chenglong You & Omar S. Magaña-Loaiza

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Contributions

M.H. and R.B.D. contributed equally. The experiment was designed by M.H., C.Y. and O.S.M.L. The theoretical description was developed by R.B.D., C.Y. and O.S.M.L. The experiment was performed by M.H., B.B. and C.Y. The data was analysed by M.H., R.B.D., C.Y. and O.S.M.L. The project was supervised by C.Y. and O.S.M.L. The idea was conceived by O.S.M.L. All authors contributed to the writing of the paper and approved the final version of the paper.

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Correspondence to Chenglong You.

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Nature Physics thanks Tobias Brixner and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Notes 1–5.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

Processed experimental data for the source shown in Fig. 1b.

Source Data Fig. 2

Processed experimental data for Fig. 2.

Source Data Fig. 3

Processed experimental data for Fig. 3.

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Hong, M., Dawkins, R.B., Bertoni, B. et al. Nonclassical near-field dynamics of surface plasmons. Nat. Phys. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02426-y

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