Photonic Crystal Architecture for Room Temperature Equilibrium Bose-Einstein Condensation of Exciton-Polaritons

Abstract

We describe photonic crystal microcavities with very strong light-matter interaction to realize room-temperature, equilibrium, exciton-polariton Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). This is achieved through a careful balance between strong light-trapping in a photonic band gap (PBG) and large exciton density enabled by a multiple quantum-well (QW) structure with moderate dielectric constant. This enables the formation of long-lived, dense 10~$\mu$m - 1~cm scale cloud of exciton-polaritons with vacuum Rabi splitting (VRS) that is roughly 7\% of the bare exciton recombination energy. We introduce a woodpile photonic crystal made of Cd${}_{0.6}$Mg${}_{0.4}$Te with a 3D PBG of 9.2\% (gap to central frequency ratio) that strongly focuses a planar guided optical field on CdTe QWs in the cavity. For 3~nm QWs with 5~nm barrier width the exciton-photon coupling can be as large as $\hbar\Ome=$55~meV (i.e., vacuum Rabi splitting $2\hbar\Ome=$110~meV). The exciton recombination energy of 1.65~eV corresponds to an optical wavelength of 750~nm. For $N=$106 QWs embedded in the cavity the collective exciton-photon coupling per QW, $\hbar\Ome/\sqrt{N}=5.4$~meV, is much larger than state-of-the-art value of 3.3~meV, for CdTe Fabry-Pérot microcavity. The maximum BEC temperature is limited by the depth of the dispersion minimum for the lower polariton branch, over which the polariton has a small effective mass $\sim 10^{-5}{m}_0$ where $m_0$ is the electron mass in vacuum. By detuning the bare exciton recombination energy above the planar guided optical mode, a larger dispersion depth is achieved, enabling room-temperature BEC.

References in corpus (18)

• Quantum fluids of light
• Quantum nature of a strongly-coupled single quantum dot-cavity system
• Observation of Superfluidity of Polaritons in Semiconductor Microcavities
• Quantised Vortices in an Exciton-Polariton Fluid
• Bose-Einstein condensation of photons in an optical microcavity
• All-optical polariton transistor
• Polariton superfluids reveal quantum hydrodynamic solitons
• Observation of Half Quantum Vortices in an Exciton-Polariton Condensate
• Persistent currents and quantised vortices in a polariton superfluid
• Realization of a double barrier resonant tunneling diode for cavity polaritons
• Ultrafast tristable spin memory of a coherent polariton gas
• Observation of grand-canonical number statistics in a photon Bose-Einstein condensate
• Long Range Ballistic Motion and Coherent Flow of Long Lifetime Polaritons
• Bose-Einstein condensation of paraxial light
• Comparison of strong coupling regimes in bulk GaAs, GaN and ZnO semiconductor microcavities
• Polariton Bose-Einstein condensate at room temperature in a Al(Ga)N nanowire-dielectric microcavity with a spatial potential trap
• Polariton Condensation and Lasing
• Inhomogeneous Broadening of Exciton Lines in Magneto-Optical Reflection from CdTe/CdMgTe Quantum Wells

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Topological Polaritons
• Quantum-dot circuit-QED thermoelectric diodes and transistors
• Polariton condensates at room temperature
• Enhancing thermophotovoltaic performance using graphene-BN-InSb near-field heterostructures
• Topological polaritons from photonic Dirac cones coupled to excitons in a magnetic field
• Photonic Architectures for Equilibrium High-Temperature Bose-Einstein Condensation in Dichalcogenide Monolayers
• Quantum many-body simulation using monolayer exciton-polaritons in coupled-cavities
• Persistent current by a static non-Hermitian ratchet
• Polariton condensation in photonic crystals with high molecular orientation
• Bose-Einstein condensation in two-dimensional traps
• 3D $Z_2$ Topological Nodes in Nonsymmorphic Photonic Crystals: Ultrastrong Coupling and Anomalous Refraction