The spontaneous emission performance of a quantum emitter coupled to a hybrid plasmonic waveguide with specified output polarization for on-chip plasmonic single-photon source

Abstract

Nowadays, most of the on-chip plasmonic single-photon sources emit an unpolarized stream of single photons that demand a subsequent polarizer stage in a practical quantum cryptography system. In this paper, we numerically demonstrated the coupling of the light emitted from a quantum emitter (QE) at 700 nm wavelength to the propagation mode supported by an on-chip hybrid plasmonic waveguide (HPW) polarization rotator. Our results proved that the light emitted is linearly polarized at 0º, 45º/−45º, and 90º with propagation lengths of 5 μm, 3.3 μm, and 3.9 μm, respectively. Moreover, high power-conversion efficiency was obtained from an applied transverse magnetic (TM) mode (0º-polarization) to a transverse electric (TE) (90º-polarization) and a linearly polarized light at 45º/−45º of 97% and a 98%, respectively. Furthermore, we obtained almost a 3-fold enhancement of the total decay rate of the QE with high emission coupling efficiency (β-factor) of 88%, 80%, and 87% to the corresponding waveguide mode for 0º, 45º/−45º, and 90º, respectively. Our work paves the way towards more efficient, compact, and less complicated on-chip plasmonic single-photon sources with a specified output polarization.