Non-secular polariton leakage and dark-state protection in hybrid plasmonic cavities

Marco Vallone

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arXiv · 2601.21597

Non-secular polariton leakage and dark-state protection in hybrid plasmonic cavities

Marco Vallone

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Abstract

A major issue in exploiting plasmonic cavities as key components in nanotechnology is the effect of radiative and absorption losses on their electrodynamic behavior. Treating them as open-systems, we derive a time-local, completely positive master equation that retains non-secular interference between decay pathways and reduces to the standard secular description when the environment resolves polariton splitting. When it does not, the theory predicts order-one deviations from secular leakage dynamics, including bath-induced coherences and stabilization of dark polaritons, and provides a simple design criterion based on the ratio of polariton splitting to reservoir linewidth. A time-resolved leakage measurement, such as transmission, reflectivity, or photoluminescence, can be used to observe these effects.

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Marco Vallone. 2026-01-29. Non-secular polariton leakage and dark-state protection in hybrid plasmonic cavities. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21597

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