We propose a practical scheme to observe the polaritonic quantum phase transition (QPT) from the superfluid (SF) to Bose-glass (BG) to Mott-insulator (MI) states. The system consists of a two-dimensional array of photonic crystal microcavities doped with substitutional donor/acceptor impurities. Using realistic parameters, we show that such strongly correlated polaritonic systems can be constructed using the state-of-art semiconductor technology.
We present novel experimental results demonstrating the coherence properties of the nonlinear emission from semiconductor microcavities in the strong coupling regime, recently interpreted by parametric polariton four-wave mixing. We use a geometry corresponding to degenerate four-wave mixing. In addition to the predicted threshold dependence of the emission on the pump power and spectral blue shift, we observe a phase dependence of the amplification which is a signature of a coherent polariton wave mixing process.
We consider the excitation of polariton wakefields due to a propagating source in a semiconductor micro cavity. We show that two kinds of wakes are possible, depending on the constituents fraction (either exciton or photon) of the polariton wavefunction. The nature of the wakefields (pure excitonic or polaritonic) can be controled by changing the speed of propagation of the external pump. This process could be used as a diagnostic for the internal parameters of the microcavity.
We develop a theory of spin fluctuations of exciton-polaritons in a semiconductor microcavity under the non-resonant unpolarized pumping. It is shown that the corresponding spin noise is sensitive to the scattering rates in the system, occupation of the ground state, statistics of polaritons, and interactions. The spin noise spectrum drastically narrows in the polariton lasing regime due to formation of a polariton condensate, while its shape can become non-Lorentzian owing to interaction-induced spin decoherence.
Analysis of exciton-polariton condensation under different pumping schemes for 1D and 2D microcavities including the effect of strong correlation between polaritons
Organic microcavities are photonic nanostructures that strongly confine the electromagnetic field, allowing exotic quantum regimes of light-matter interaction with disordered organic semiconductors. The unambiguous interpretation of the spectra of organic microcavities has been a long-standing challenge due to several competing effects involving electrons, vibrations and cavity photons. Here we present a theoretical framework that is able to describe the main spectroscopic features of organic microcavities consistently. We introduce a class of light-matter excitations called dark vibronic pola…
We present a reaction/diffusion model for the formation of a lower polariton condensate in a micro cavity containing an organic semiconducting molecular crystalline film. Our model--based upon an anthracene film sandwiched between two reflecting dielectric mirrors--consists of three coupled fields corresponding to a gas of excitons created by an external driving pulse, a reservoir of vibron states formed by the coupling between a ground-state vibrational model and a cavity photon, and a lower polariton condensate. We show that at finite temperature, the presence of the vibron reservoir can aug…
Using an extended Tavis-Cummings model, we study the effect of the spin-orbit coupling between the singlet and the triplet molecular excitons in organic microcavities in the strong coupling regime. The model is solved in the single excitation space for polaritons, which contains the bright (permutation symmetric) singlet and triplet excitons, as well as the dark bands consisting of the nonsymmetric excitons of either type. We find that the spin-orbit coupling splits the lower polariton into two branches, and also creates a triplet polariton when the cavity mode is in resonance with the triplet…
We show that when following a simple cavity design metric, a quantum well exciton-microcavity photon coupling constant can be larger than the exciton binding energy in GaAs based optical microcavities. Such a very strong coupling significantly reduces the relative electron-hole motion and makes the polaritons robust against phonon collisions. The corresponding polariton dissociation and saturation boundaries on the phase diagram are much improved, and our calculations suggest the possibility of constructing a room temperature, high power exciton-polariton laser without resorting to wide bandga…
Bosons hopping across sites and interacting on-site are the essence of the Bose-Hubbard model (BHM). Inspired by the success of BHM simulators with atoms in optical lattices, proposals for implementing the BHM with photons in coupled nonlinear cavities have emerged. Two coupled semiconductor microcavities constitute a model system where the hopping, interaction, and decay of exciton polaritons --- mixed light-matter quasiparticles --- can be engineered in combination with site-selective coherent driving to implement the driven-dissipative two-site optical BHM. Here we explore the interplay of …
Rotation-induced splitting of the otherwise degenerate photonic bands is predicted for a two-dimensional photonic crystal made of evanescently coupled microcavities. The symmetry-broken energy splitting is similar to the Zeeman splitting of atomic levels or electron's (hole's) magnetic moment sublevels in an external magnetic field. The orbital motion of photons in periodic photonic lattice of microcavities is shown to enhance significantly such Coriolis-Zeeman splitting as compared to a solitary microcavity [D.L. Boiko, Optics Express 2, 397 (1998)]. The equation of motion suggests that nonst…
We study a model of a photon mode dipole-coupled to a medium of two-level oscillators in a microcavity in the presence of dephasing processes introduced by coupling to external baths. Decoherence processes can be classified as pair-breaking or non-pair-breaking in analogy with magnetic or non-magnetic impurities in superconductors. In the absence of dephasing, the ground state of the model is a polariton condensate with a gap in the excitation spectrum. Increase of the pair-breaking parameter $γ$ reduces the gap, which becomes zero at a critical value $γ_{C1}$; for large $γ$, the conventional …
We study the generation of entangled light in planar semiconductor microcavities. The focus is on a particular pump configuration where the dissipative internal polariton dynamics leads to the emission of entangled light in a W-state. Our study is based on the nonlinear equations of motion for the polariton operators derived within the dynamics-controlled truncation formalism. They include the losses through the cavity mirrors, the interaction with lattice vibrations, and the external laser driving in a Langevin approach. We find that the generated entanglement is robust against decoherence un…
We discuss the optimization of optical microcavity designs based on 2D photonic crystals for the purpose of strong coupling between the cavity field and a single neutral atom trapped within a hole. We present numerical predictions for the quality factors and mode volumes of localized defect modes as a function of geometric parameters, and discuss some experimental challenges related to the coupling of a defect cavity to gas-phase atoms.
We examine the possibility of observing Bose condensation of a confined two-dimensional polariton gas in an organic quantum well. We deduce a suitable parameterization of a model Hamiltonian based upon the cavity geometry, the biexciton binding energy, and similar spectroscopic and structural data. By converting the sum-over-states to a semiclassical integration over $d$-dimensional phase space, we show that while an ideal 2-D Bose gas will not undergo condensation, an interacting gas with the Bogoliubov dispersion $H(p)\approx s p$ close to $p=0$ will undergo Bose condensation at a given crit…
Organic exciton-photon polariton lasers have recently been shown to be remarkable candidates for the realization of efficient sources of coherent light operating at room temperature. While their thresholds are now comparable with conventional organic photon lasers, tuning of molecular conformation and orientation as a means to further enhance their performance remains largely unexplored. Here, we first report a two-fold reduction in the threshold of a polariton laser based on a high-Q microcavity filled with an active layer of poly(9,9-dioctylfluorene) (PFO) when 15% β-phase conformation is in…
A technique is demonstrated which efficiently transfers light between a tapered standard single-mode optical fiber and a resonant mode of a high-Q photonic crystal cavity with mode volume less than a cubic wavelength in size. Cavity mode quality factors of 4.7 x 10^4 are measured, and a total fiber-to-cavity coupling efficiency of 44% is demonstrated.
Singlet fission is an important candidate to increase energy conversion efficiency in organic photovoltaics by providing a pathway to increase the quantum yield of excitons per photon absorbed in select materials. We investigate the dependence of exciton quantum yield for acenes in the strong light-matter interaction (polariton) regime, where the materials are embedded in optical microcavities. Starting from an open-quantum-systems approach, we build a kinetic model for time-evolution of species of interest in the presence of quenchers and show that polaritons can decrease or increase exciton …
We develop in this work a simple qualitative quantum electron transport model, in the strong light-matter coupling regime under dipole approximation, able to capture polaritonic signatures in the time-dependent electrical current. The effect of the quantized electromagnetic field in the displacement current of a resonant tunneling diode inside an optical cavity is analyzed. The original peaks of the bare electron transmission coefficient split into two new peaks due to the resonant electron-photon interaction, leading to coherent Rabi oscillations among the polaritonic states that are develope…
We propose and theoretically analyze a new scheme for generating hyper-entangled photon pairs in a system of polaritons in coupled planar microcavities. Starting from a microscopic model, we evaluate the relevant parametric scattering processes and numerically simulate the phonon-induced noise background under continuous-wave excitation. Our results show that, compared to other polariton entanglement proposals, our scheme enables the generation of photon pairs that are entangled in both path and polarization degrees of freedom, and simultaneously leads to a strong reduction of the photolumines…
In the regime of strong coupling between molecular excitons and confined optical modes, the intra-molecular degrees of freedom are profoundly affected, leading to a reduced vibrational dressing of polaritons compared to bare electronically excited states. However, existing models only describe a single vibrational mode in each molecule, while actual molecules possess a large number of vibrational degrees of freedom and additionally interact with a continuous bath of phononic modes in the host medium in typical experiments. In this work, we investigate a small ensemble of molecules with an arbi…
Semiconductor microcavities in the strong-coupling regime exhibit an energy scale in the THz frequency range, which is fixed by the Rabi splitting between the upper and lower exciton-polariton states. While this range can be tuned by several orders of magnitude using different excitonic medium, the transition between both polaritonic states is dipole forbidden. In this work we show that in Cadmium Telluride microcavities, the Rabi-oscillation driven THz radiation is actually active without the need for any change in the microcavity design. This feature results from the unique resonance conditi…
We design extremely flexible ultrahigh-Q diamond-based double-heterostructure photonic crystal slab cavities by modifying the refractive index of the diamond. The refractive index changes needed for ultrahigh-Q cavities with $Q ~ 10^7$, are well within what can be achieved ($Δn \sim 0.02$). The cavity modes have relatively small volumes $V<2 (λ/n)^3$, making them ideal for cavity quantum electro-dynamic applications. Importantly for realistic fabrication, our design is flexible because the range of parameters, cavity length and the index changes, that enables an ultrahigh-Q is quite broad. Fur…
We study the laser regime of terahertz (THz) emission from a semiconductor microcavity in the strong coupling regime, where optical transitions between upper and lower exciton-polariton modes are allowed due to the mixing of the upper mode with one of the dark exciton states. Using a system of master-Boltzmann equations describing both polariton modes and the THz mode, we calculate the first and second order coherences and the spectral shape of THz emission. This analysis shows that THz lasing in microcavities is possible provided that the system is embedded in a good THz cavity, that the opti…
We propose and design photonic crystal cavities (PCCs) in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) for diverse photonic and quantum applications. Two dimensional (2D) hBN flakes contain quantum emitters which are ultra-bright and photostable at room temperature. To achieve optimal coupling of these emitters to optical resonators, fabrication of cavities from monolithic hBN is therefore required, to maximize the overlap between cavity optical modes and the emitters. Here, we design 2D and 1D PCCs using anisotropic indices of hBN. The influence of underlying substrates and material absorption are investiga…
New solid-state physics based approach is developed for analysis of the paraxial light propagation in two-dimensional (2D) photonic lattices of coupled dielectric waveguides or microcavities. In particular, using Maxwell's equations, a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian eigenproblem with respect to the spinor wave function of a photon is obtained for energy-dissipating photonic microstructures. The Hamiltonian is suitable for almost the entire subclass of 2D structures encompassing arrays of semiconductor microcavities and microstructured photonic crystal fibers, characterized by light propagating most…
We present the design of two-dimensional photonic crystal microcavities in thin diamond membranes well suited for coupling of color centers in diamond. By comparing simulated and ideal field distributions in Fourier and real space and by according modification of air hole positions and size, we optimize the cavity structure yielding high quality factors up to Q = 320000 with a modal volume of V = 0.35 (lambda/n)^3. Using the very same approach we also improve previous designs of a small modal volume microcavity in silicon, gaining a factor of 3 in cavity Q. In view of practical realization of …
Bistability of Exciton-Photon Microcavities in the Ultrastrong-Coupling Regime
Division of Science, New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校科学系）；Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences, New York University（纽约大学库朗数学科学研究所）；Univ. Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, LAMIH, CNRS, UMR 8201（上法兰西高等理工学院，LAMIH实验室，法国国家科学研究中心，联合研究单位8201）
Quantum simulations are one of the pillars of quantum technologies. These simulations provide insight in fields as varied as high energy physics, many-body physics, or cosmology to name only a few. Several platforms, ranging from ultracold-atoms to superconducting circuits through trapped ions have been proposed as quantum simulators. This article reviews recent developments in another well established platform for quantum simulations: polaritons in semiconductor microcavities. These quasiparticles obey a nonlinear Schrödigner equation (NLSE), and their propagation in the medium can be underst…
The realization of exciton-polaritons -- hybrid excitations of semiconductor quantum well excitons and cavity photons -- has been of great technological and scientific significance. In particular, the short-range collisional interaction between excitons has enabled explorations into a wealth of nonequilibrium and hydrodynamical effects that arise in weakly nonlinear polariton condensates. Yet, the ability to enhance optical nonlinearities would enable quantum photonics applications and open up a new realm of photonic many-body physics in a scalable and engineerable solid-state environment. Her…
