Towards polariton blockade of confined exciton–polaritons
Date
03/2019Keywords
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Abstract
Cavity–polaritons in semiconductor microstructures have emerged as a promising system for exploring non-equilibrium dynamics of many-body systems1. Key advances in this field, including the observation of polariton condensation2 , superfluidity3, realization of topological photonic bands4, and dissipative phase transitions5–7, generically allow for a description based on a mean-field Gross–Pitaevskii formalism. Observation of polariton intensity squeezing8,9 and decoherence of a polarization entangled photon pair by a polariton condensate10, on the other hand, demonstrate quantum effects that show up at high polariton occupancy. Going beyond and into the regime of strongly correlated polaritons requires the observation of a photon blockade effect11,12 where interactions are strong enough to suppress double occupancy of a photonic lattice site. Here, we report evidence of quantum correlations between polaritons spatially confined in a fibre cavity. Photon correlation measurements show that careful tuning of the coupled system can lead to a modest reduction of simultaneous two-polariton generation probability by 5%. Concurrently, our experiments allow us to measure the polariton interaction strength, thereby resolving the controversy stemming from recent experimental reports13. Our findings constitute an essential step towards the realization of strongly interacting photonic systems.
Citation
Delteil , A , Fink , T , Schade , A , Höfling , S , Schneider , C & Imamoğlu , A 2019 , ' Towards polariton blockade of confined exciton–polaritons ' , Nature Materials , vol. 18 , no. 3 , pp. 219-222 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-019-0282-y
Publication
Nature Materials
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1476-1122Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2019. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-019-0282-y
Description
This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) through a DACH project 200021E-158569-1, SNSF National Centre of Competence in Research – Quantum Science and Technology (NCCR QSIT) and an ERC Advanced investigator grant (POLTDES). The Würzburg Group acknowledges support by the state of Bavaria, and the DFG within project SCHN1376-3.1.Collections
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