Strong and Coherent Coupling of a Plasmonic Nanoparticle to a Subwavelength Fabry-Pérot Resonator

A major aim in experimental nano- and quantum optics is observing and controlling the interaction between light and matter on a microscopic scale. Coupling molecules or atoms to optical microresonators is a prominent method to alter their optical properties such as luminescence spectra or lifetimes. Until today strong coupling of optical resonators to such objects has only been observed with atom-like systems in high quality resonators. We demonstrate first experiments revealing strong coupling between individual plasmonic gold nanorods (GNR) and a tunable low quality resonator by observing cavity-length-dependent nonlinear dephasing and spectral shifts indicating spectral anticrossing of the luminescent coupled system. These phenomena and experimental results can be described by a model of two coupled oscillators representing the plasmon resonance of the GNR and the optical fields of the resonator. The presented reproducible and accurately tunable resonator allows us to precisely control the optical properties of individual particles.