  We provide the quantum mechanical description of the excitation of long-range
surface plasmon polaritons (LRSPPs) on thin metallic strips. The excitation
process consists of an attenuated-reflection setup, where efficient
photon-to-LRSPP wavepacket-transfer is shown to be achievable. For calculating
the coupling, we derive the first quantization of LRSPPs in the polaritonic
regime. We study quantum statistics during propagation and characterize the
performance of photon-to-LRSPP quantum state transfer for single-photons,
photon-number states and photonic coherent superposition states.
