Demonstration of quadrature-squeezed surface plasmons in a gold waveguide.

We report on the efficient generation, propagation, and reemission of squeezed long-range surface-plasmon polaritons in a gold waveguide. Squeezed light is used to excite the nonclassical surface-plasmon polaritons, and the reemitted quantum state is fully characterized by complete quantum tomographic reconstruction of the density matrix. We find that the plasmon-assisted transmission of nonclassical light in metallic waveguides can be described by a beam splitter relation. This result is explained theoretically.