Strong evidence of a single-photon tunneling effect, a direct analog of single-electron tunneling, has been obtained in the measurements of light tunneling through individual subwavelength pinholes in a thick gold film covered with a layer of polydiacetylene. The transmission of some pinholes reached saturation because of the optical nonlinearity of polydiacetylene at a very low light intensity of a few thousands photons per second. This result is explained theoretically in terms of photon blockade, similar to the Coulomb blockade phenomenon observed in single-electron tunneling experiments. The single-photon tunneling effect may find many applications in the emerging fields of quantum communication and information processing.
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