Coherent perfect absorption of a single photon in a metamaterial

Vezzoli, S., Altuzarra, C., Roger, T., Valente, J., Bolduc, E., Heitz, J., Leach, J., Jeffers, J., Soci, C., Couteau, C., Zheludev, N.I. and Faccio, D. (2015) Coherent perfect absorption of a single photon in a metamaterial. 8th International Conference on Materials for Advanced Technologies (ICMAT 2015), Singapore. 27 Jun - 02 Jul 2015.

Abstract

We report on the first experimental verification of the coherent perfect absorption (CPA) process in a plasmonic metamaterial absorber using single photons from spontaneous parametric down conversion.
Many technologies, from photovoltaics to photocatalysis, depend on the absorption of light. Nanostructured "perfect absorber" metamaterials and textured surfaces have been developed to improve absorption and obtain full absorption of the impinging light. Recently, coherent perfect absorption (CPA) from a standing wave has been shown to deliver either nearly total absorption or full transmission of the incident light, depending on the mutual phase of incident beams.
Despite quite few classical verification of the CPA process in various systems, its quantum nature has not yet been explored. Here we devise a quantum version of the experiment: with a single photon entering the device at a time, we observe periodic oscillation in the output photon count rate as the phase shift between two input channels changes. The overall modulation was measured to be between 90% and 10%.
In conclusion, we demonstrated that coherent perfect absorption can be observed even with a single photon, which could be coupled with nearly 100% probability into a localized plasmon.

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Contributors

Author: N.I. Zheludev

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