Two-dimensional semiconductors host excitons with very large oscillator strengths and binding energies due to significantly reduced carrier screening. Two-dimensional semiconductors integrated with optical cavities are emerging as a promising platform for studying strong light-matter interactions as a route to explore a variety of exotic many-body effects. Here, in few-layered WS2 coupled with plasmonic nanoparticle lattices, we observe the formation of a collective polaritonic mode near the exciton energy and the formation of a complete polariton band gap with energy scale comparable to the exciton-plasmon coupling strength. A coupled oscillator model reveals that the collective mode arises from the cooperative coupling of the excitons to the plasmonic lattice diffraction orders via exciton-exciton interactions. The emergence of the collective mode is accompanied by a superlinear increase of the polariton mode splitting as a function of the square root of the exciton oscillator strength. The presence of these many body effects, which are enhanced in systems which lack bulk polarization, not only allows the formation of a collective mode with periodically varying field profiles, but also further enhances the exciton-plasmon coupling. By integrating the hybrid WS2-plasmonic lattice device with a field-effect transistor, we demonstrate active tuning of the collective mode and the polariton band gap. These systems provide new opportunities for obtaining a deeper and systematic understanding of many body cooperative phenomena in periodic photonic systems and for designing more complex and actively controllable polaritonic devices including switchable polariton lasers, waveguides, and optical logical elements.
Polaritonic self-hybridized critical coupling by Brillouin zone folding induced quasi-bound states in the continuum in bulk WS2 metasurfaces
Key Laboratory for Physical Electronics and Devices of the Ministry of Education and Shaanxi Key Lab of Information Photonic Technique, School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（教育部电子科学与技术重点实验室和陕西信息光子技术重点实验室，西安交通大学电子科学与工程学院）
Material characteristics and input-field specifics limit the controllability of nonlinear electromagnetic-field interactions. As these nonlinear interactions could be exploited to create strongly localized bright and dark waves, such as nonlinear surface polaritons, ameliorating this limitation is important. We present our approach to amelioration, which is based on a surface-polaritonic waveguide reconfiguration that enables excitation, propagation and coherent control of coupled dark rogue waves having orthogonal polarizations. Our control mechanism is achieved by finely tuning laser-field i…
Systems with strong light-matter interaction opens up new avenues for studying topological phases of matter. Examples include exciton-polaritons, mixed light-matter quasiparticles, where the topology of the polaritonic band structure arises from the collective coupling between matter wave and optical fields strongly confined in periodic dielectric structures. Distinct from light-matter interaction in a uniform environment, the spatially varying nature of the optical fields leads to a fundamental modification of the well-known optical selection rules, which were derived under the plane wave app…
Using femtosecond laser machining, we have fabricated photonic bandgap materials that influence propagation of phonon-polaritons in ferroelectric crystals. Broadband polaritons were generated with impulsive stimulated Raman scattering (ISRS) using an ultrashort laser pulse, and the spatial and temporal evolution of the polaritons were imaged as they propagated through the fabricated structures with polariton real-space imaging. These techniques offer a new approach to optical materials design.
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We study super-Planckian near-field heat exchanges for multilayer hyperbolic metamaterials using exact S-matrix calculations. We investigate heat exchanges between two multilayer hyperbolic metamaterial structures. We show that the super- Planckian emission of such metamaterials can either come from the presence of surface phonon-polaritons modes or from a continuum of hyperbolic modes depending on the choice of composite materials as well as the structural configuration.
Multiple surface plasmon-polariton (SPP) waves excited at the interface of a homogeneous isotropic metal and a chiral sculptured thin film (STF) impregnated with silver nanoparticles were theoretically assessed for the multiple-SPP-waves-based sensing of a fluid uniformly infiltrating the chiral STF. The Bruggemann homogenization formalism was used in two different modalities to determine the three principal relative permittivity scalars of the silver-nanoparticle-impregnated chiral STF infiltrated uniformly by the fluid. The dynamic sensitivity increased when silver nanoparticles were present…
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In this paper we develop a microscopic analysis of the light scattering on a periodic two-level atomic array coupled to an optical nanofiber. We extend the scattering matrix approach for two-level system interaction with nanofiber fundamental waveguiding mode HE_{11}, that allows us modeling the scattering spectra. We support these results considering the dispersion of the polaritonic states formed by the superposition of the fundamental mode of light HE_{11} and the atomic chain states. To illustrate our approach we start with considering a simple model of light scattering over atomic array i…
In the quest aimed at unveiling alternative plasmonic elements overcoming noble metals for selected applications in photonics, we investigate by numerical simulations the near ultraviolet-to-near infrared optical response of solid and liquid Bi nanospheres embedded in a dielectric matrix. We also determine the resulting transmission contrast upon reversible solid-liquid phase transition to evaluate their potential for switchable optical filtering. The optical response of the solid (liquid) Bi nanospheres is ruled by localized polaritonic (plasmonic) resonances tunable by controlling the diamet…
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In the Reststrahlen region, between the transverse and longitudinal phonon frequencies, polar dielectric materials respond metallically to light and the resulting strong light-matter interactions can lead to the formation of hybrid quasiparticles termed surface phonon polaritons. Recent works have demonstrated that when an optical system contains nanoscale polar elements these excitations can acquire a longitudinal field component as a result of the material dispersion of the lattice, leading to the formation of secondary quasiparticles termed longitudinal-transverse polaritons. In this work w…
Light-matter coupling in excitonic materials has been the subject of intense investigation due to emergence of new excitonic materials. Two-dimensional layered hybrid organic/inorganic perovskites (2D HOIPs) support strongly bound excitons at room-temperatures with some of the highest oscillator strengths and electric loss tangents among the known excitonic materials. Here, we report strong light-matter coupling in Ruddlesden-Popper phase 2D-HOIPs crystals without the necessity of an external cavity. We report concurrent occurrence of multiple-orders of hybrid light-matter states via both refl…
We study theoretically the quantum dynamics and spectroscopy of rovibrational polaritons formed in a model system composed of a single rovibrating diatomic molecule, which interacts with two degenerate, orthogonally polarized modes of an optical Fabry-Pérot cavity. We employ an effective rovibrational Pauli-Fierz Hamiltonian in length gauge representation and identify three-state vibro-polaritonic conical intersections (VPCIs) between singly-excited vibro-polaritonic states in a two-dimensional angular coordinate branching space. The lower and upper vibrational polaritons are of mixed light-ma…
Recent experimental advances in Positronium (Ps) physics have made it possible to produce dense Ps ensembles in which Ps-Ps interactions may occur, leading to the production of Ps$_2$ molecules and paving the way to the realization of a Ps Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC). In order to achieve this latter goal it would be advantageous to develop new methods to measure Ps densities in real-time. Here we describe a possible approach to do this using polaritonic methods: using realistic experimental parameters we demonstrate that a dense Ps gas can be strongly coupled to the photonic field of a dist…
We investigate second harmonic generation (SHG) from hexagonal periodic arrays of triangular nano-holes of aluminum using a self-consistent methodology based on the hydrodynamics-Maxwell-Bloch approach. It is shown that angular polarization patterns of the far-field second harmonic response abide to three-fold symmetry constraints on tensors. When a molecular layer is added to the system and its parameters are adjusted to achieve the strong coupling regime between a localized plasmon mode and molecular excitons, Rabi splitting is observed from occurrence of both single- and two-photon transiti…
Polaritonic modes in low-dimensional materials enable strong light-matter interactions and provide a platform for light manipulation at nanoscale. Very recently, a new class of polaritons has attracted considerable interest in nanophotonics: image polaritons in van der Waals crystals, manifesting when a polaritonic material is in close proximity to a highly conductive metal, so that the polaritonic mode couples with its mirror image. Image modes constitute an appealing nanophotonic platform, providing an unparalleled degree of optical field compression into nanometric volumes while exhibiting …
