Dresden 2009 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik

O 54: Nano-optics of metallic and semiconducting nanostructures (experiments II)

O 54.4: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 26. März 2009, 15:45–16:00, SCH A216

Wave-Particle Duality of Single Surface Plasmon Polaritons — •Bernhard Grotz¹, Roman Kolesov¹, Gopalakrishnan Balasubramanian¹, Rainer Stöhr¹, Aurélien Nicolet¹, Philip Hemmer², Fedor Jelezko¹, and Jörg Wrachtrup¹ — ¹3. Physikalisches Institut, Universität Stuttgart, Germany — ²Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA

When light interacts with metal surfaces it excites electrons which can form propagating excitation waves called surface plasmon polaritons (SPP). These collective electronic excitations have many applications due to their ability to produce strong electric fields, localized to sub-wavelength distance scales. However many potential applications, in particular those related to quantum networks, require a deep understanding of fundamental quantum properties of SPPs. Remarkably these collective electron states preserve many key quantum mechanical properties of the original photons used to excite them, like entanglement and sub-poissonian statistics. Here we experimentally show that single surface plasmon polaritons also exhibit wave and particle properties similar to those of single photons. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a detailed analysis of spectral interference pattern provides a new method to characterize dimensions of metallic waveguides with nanometer accuracy.