Photon antibunching in the optical near field

Abstract

We show that a combination of the field-susceptibility technique with the optical Bloch equations gives access to the temporal evolution of the populations and coherences of any quantum system placed in the optical near field of a nanostructure. In particular, we show that the near-field evanescent states, confined around dielectric or plasmonic particles, can be used to modify and control the photon statistics of the quantum system. This theoretical scheme leads to second-order autocorrelation functions in good agreement with recent experimental measurements performed with nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond nanocrystals placed in interaction with gold nanoparticles.