Path entanglement of surface plasmons

Abstract

Metals can sustain traveling electromagnetic waves at their surfaces supported by the collective oscillations of their free electrons in unison. Remarkably, classical electromagnetism captures the essential physics of these 'surface plasma' waves using simple models with only macroscopic features, accounting for microscopic electron–electron and electron–phonon interactions with a single, semi-empirical damping parameter. Nevertheless, in quantum theory these microscopic interactions could be important, as any substantial environmental interactions could decohere quantum superpositions of surface plasmons, the quanta of these waves. Here we report a measurement of path entanglement between surface plasmons with 95% contrast, confirming that a path-entangled state can indeed survive without measurable decoherence. Our measurement suggests that elastic scattering mechanisms of the type that might cause pure dephasing in plasmonic systems must be weak enough not to significantly perturb the state of the metal under the experimental conditions we investigated.