Quantum Coherence is Preserved in Extremely Dispersive Plasmonic Media

Abstract: Quantum plasmonics experiments have on multiple occasions reported the observation of quantum coherence of discrete plasmons, which exhibit remarkable preservation of quantum interference visibility, a seemingly surprising feature for systems mixing light and matter with high ohmic losses during propagation. However, most experiments to date used essentially weakly-confined plasmons, which experience limited light-matter hybridization, thus limiting the potential for decoherence. Here, we report quantum coherence of plasmons near the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) resonance frequency, where plasmonic dispersion and confinement is much stronger than in previous experiments. We generated polarization-entangled pairs of photons using spontaneous parametric down conversion and transmitted one of the photons through a plasmonic hole array designed to convert incident single photons into highly-dispersive single SPPs. We find the quality of photon entanglement after the plasmonic channel to be unperturbed by the introduction of a highly dispersive plasmonic element. Our findings provide a lower bound of 100 femtoseconds for the pure dephasing time for dispersive plasmons in gold, and show that even in a highly dispersive regime surface plasmons preserve quantum mechanical correlations, making possible harnessing the power of extreme light confinement for integrated quantum photonics.