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Nature Research, Nature Communications, 1(6), 2015

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8031

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Coherent perfect absorption in deeply subwavelength films in the single-photon regime

Journal article published in 2015 by Thomas Roger ORCID, Stefano Vezzoli, Eliot Bolduc, Joao Valente ORCID, Julius J. F. Heitz, John Jeffers, Cesare Soci, Jonathan Leach, Christophe Couteau, Nikolay I. Zheludev, Daniele Faccio ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

AbstractThe technologies of heating, photovoltaics, water photocatalysis and artificial photosynthesis depend on the absorption of light and novel approaches such as coherent absorption from a standing wave promise total dissipation of energy. Extending the control of absorption down to very low light levels and eventually to the single-photon regime is of great interest and yet remains largely unexplored. Here we demonstrate the coherent absorption of single photons in a deeply subwavelength 50% absorber. We show that while the absorption of photons from a travelling wave is probabilistic, standing wave absorption can be observed deterministically, with nearly unitary probability of coupling a photon into a mode of the material, for example, a localized plasmon when this is a metamaterial excited at the plasmon resonance. These results bring a better understanding of the coherent absorption process, which is of central importance for light harvesting, detection, sensing and photonic data processing applications.