Plasmonic Waveguides to Enhance Quantum Electrodynamic Phenomena at the Nanoscale

The emerging field of plasmonics can lead to enhanced light matter interactions at extremely nanoscale regions. Plasmonic (metallic) devices promise to efficiently control both classical and quantum properties of light. Plasmonic waveguides are usually used to excite confined electromagnetic modes at the nanoscale that can strongly interact with matter. The analysis of these nanowaveguides exhibits similarities with their low frequency microwave counterparts. In this article, we review ways to study plasmonic nanostructures coupled to quantum optical emitters from a classical electromagnetic perspective. These quantum emitters are mainly used to generate single photon quantum light that can be employed as a quantum bit or qubit in the envisioned quantum information technologies. We demonstrate different ways to enhance a diverse range of quantum electrodynamic phenomena based on plasmonic configurations by using the classical dyadic tensor Green function formalism. More specifically, spontaneous emission and superradiance are analyzed by using the Green function based field quantization. The exciting new field of quantum plasmonics will lead to a plethora of novel optical devices for communications and computing applications operating in the quantum realm, such as efficient single-photon sources, quantum sensors, and compact on-chip nanophotonic circuits.

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