Towards polariton blockade of confined exciton–polaritons

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.