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Anomalous dispersion of microcavity trion-polaritons

Nature Physics volume 14, pages 130–133 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

The strong coupling of excitons to optical cavities has provided new insights into cavity quantum electrodynamics as well as opportunities to engineer nanoscale light–matter interactions1,2,3,4,5,6. Here we study the interaction between out-of-equilibrium cavity photons and both neutral and negatively charged excitons, by embedding a single layer of the atomically thin semiconductor molybdenum diselenide in a monolithic optical cavity based on distributed Bragg reflectors. The interactions lead to multiple cavity polariton resonances and anomalous band inversion for the lower, trion-derived, polariton branch—the central result of the present work. Our theoretical analysis reveals that many-body effects in an out-of-equilibrium setting result in an effective level attraction between the exciton-polariton and trion-polariton accounting for the experimentally observed inverted trion-polariton dispersion. Our results suggest a pathway for studying interesting regimes in quantum many-body physics yielding possible new phases of quantum matter7,8,9,10,11 as well as fresh possibilities for polaritonic device architectures12,13,14,15.

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Figure 1: Device architecture and cavity polariton physics.
Figure 2: Optical characterization of the cavity, MoSe2 flake and the polariton device.
Figure 3: Measuring the device dispersion relation.
Figure 4: Temperature dependence of the interactions.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by NSF EFRI EFMA-1542707, NSF CAREER DMR 1553788, AFOSR FA9550-16-1-0020 and the University of Rochester University Research Award and the Leonard Mandel Faculty Fellowship in Quantum Optics. S.D. also acknowledges support from a Ramanujan Fellowship research grant, SERB, and ISIRD project SRIC, IIT Kharagpur. S.B. acknowledges the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft for funding though MPI partner group at ICTS.

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Author notes

  1. S. Dhara and C. Chakraborty: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA

    S. Dhara, K. M. Goodfellow, L. Qiu, T. A. O’Loughlin, G. W. Wicks & A. N. Vamivakas

  2. Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 721302, India

    S. Dhara

  3. Materials Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA

    C. Chakraborty, G. W. Wicks & A. N. Vamivakas

  4. Center for Coherence & Quantum Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA

    C. Chakraborty, K. M. Goodfellow, L. Qiu & A. N. Vamivakas

  5. International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore 560089, India

    Subhro Bhattacharjee

  6. Department of Physics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA

    A. N. Vamivakas

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Contributions

S.D., C.C., K.M.G., T.A.O’L., G.W.W. and A.N.V. conceived the research. S.D., C.C., T.A.O’L. and K.M.G. fabricated the samples. S.D., C.C. and L.Q. conducted the measurements. S.D., C.C., S.B. and A.N.V. devised the theoretical model. All authors discussed the data and wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to A. N. Vamivakas.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Dhara, S., Chakraborty, C., Goodfellow, K. et al. Anomalous dispersion of microcavity trion-polaritons. Nat. Phys. 14, 130–133 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys4303

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