We present a surface plasmon resonance scheme for the excitation of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) employing vacuum-induced transparency. The system under consideration consists of a metal-dielectric interface placed within an optical cavity, where the dielectric medium is composed of three-level atoms in a $\mathrm{\Lambda }$-type configuration. These atoms interact coherently with an incident probe and quantized cavity fields. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that SPPs can be excited even in the absence of classical control fields, i.e., when the cavity is in its vacuum state. We also show that the electric-field-enhancement factor increases with the number of cavity photons. Furthermore, we analyze the propagation length and lifetime of the SPPs and observe that both are enhanced as the cavity photon number increases.

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• Light-matter interaction
• Plasmonics
• Quantum optics