Highly Efficient Single Photon Coupling via surface Plasmons into Single-Mode Optical Fiber

Abstract Quanta of light (single photon) play as one of building blocks of photonic based quantum computations, sensing and communications. This makes a necessity to develop practical approaches for tuning, guiding and coupling of single photons in photonic circuits for viable applications. Interaction and coupling efficiency of Single photon into optical fibers is a technical bottleneck of quantum optics and should be addressed by novel design and materials. Here, we introduce a fiber-based micro-photonic design to directly and efficiently coupling of the emitted single-photon to the core of a single mode fiber (SMF), the results of simulation indicate that emission of single photon source on a D-shaped SMF coated by a thin plasmonic film, provide remarkable amplifying of evanescent field by confined surface plasmons into the SMF. The numerical analysis on different types and thicknesses of plamsonic materials by finite element method (FEM) is conducted to study the propagation vectors along the SMF as function of emission angle and wavelength of the single photon source. The results revealed that by optimum thickness of tantalum layer as novel plasmonic material, the best record of coupling efficiency as high as 60% can be achieved in fiber optic communication region (∼1550 nm). This approach shed a light on novel plasmonic assisted coupling and promises a functional strategy for single photon manipulating in various field of quantum optics.