Abstract
Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are collective excitations of free electrons propagating along a metal-dielectric interface. Although some basic quantum properties of SPPs, such as the preservation of entanglement, the wave-particle duality of a single plasmon, the quantum interference of two plasmons, and the verification of entanglement generation, have been shown, more advanced quantum information protocols have yet to be demonstrated with SPPs. Here, we experimentally realize quantum state teleportation between single photons and SPPs. To achieve this, we use polarization-entangled photon pairs, coherent photon–plasmon–photon conversion on a metallic subwavelength hole array, complete Bell-state measurements and an active feed-forward technique. The results of both quantum state and quantum process tomography confirm the quantum nature of the SPP mediated teleportation. An average state fidelity of 0.889pm 0.004 and a process fidelity of 0.820pm 0.005, which are well above the classical limit, are achieved. Our work shows that SPPs may be useful for realizing complex quantum protocols in a photonic-plasmonic hybrid quantum network.
Highlights
Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are collective excitations of free electrons propagating along a metal-dielectric interface
Some quantum properties of new plasmonic metamaterials have been explored, such as coherent perfect absorption in plasmonic metamaterials with entangled photons[19], testing hyper-complex quantum theories with negative refractive index metamaterials[20] and the active control of plasmonic metamaterials operating in the quantum r egime[21]
Our scheme is based on three qubits, which is first proposed by P opescu[33] and realized in experiment by Boshi et al.[24]
Summary
Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are collective excitations of free electrons propagating along a metal-dielectric interface. We experimentally realize the quantum state teleportation of a single photon to a single SPP, which is a single qubit consisting of collective electronic excitations typically involving ∼106 electrons[17]. There, the quantum state of Q2 is transferred to qubit 3 (Q3), carried by a single SPP.
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