  We report on the observation of coupling a single nitrogen vacancy (NV)
center in a nanodiamond crystal to a propagating plasmonic mode of silver
nanowires. The nanocrystal is placed either near to the apex of a single silver
nanowire or in the gap between two end-to-end aligned silver nanowires. We
observe an enhancement of the NV-centers' decay rate in both cases as a result
of the coupling to the plasmons. The devices are nano-assembled with a scanning
probe technique. Through simulations, we show that end-to-end aligned silver
nanowires can be used as a controllable splitter for emission from a dipole
emitter.
