Molding Photon Emission with Hybrid Plasmon-Emitter Coupled Metasurfaces

Abstract

Directional emission of photons with designed polarizations and orbital angular momenta is crucial for exploiting the full potential of quantum emitters (QEs) within quantum information technologies. Capitalizing on the concept of hybrid plasmon-QE coupled metasurfaces, a holography-based design approach is developed allowing one to construct surface nanostructures for outcoupling QE-excited circularly diverging surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) into well-collimated beams of photons with desirable polarization characteristics propagating along given directions. Using the well-established simulation framework, the efficiency and versatility of the developed approach are demonstrated by analyzing different hybrid SPP-QE coupled metasurfaces designed for the generation of linearly, radially, and circularly polarized photons propagating in various off-axis directions. This work enables the design of single-photon sources with radiation channels that have distinct directional and polarization characteristics, extending thereby possibilities for designing complex photonic systems for quantum information processing. Moreover, it is believed that the developed scattering holography approach is generally useful when employing surface electromagnetic excitations, including SPP modes, as reference waves for signal wave reconstruction.