Accelerating Polaritons with External Electric and Magnetic Fields

Abstract

It is widely assumed that photons cannot be manipulated using electric or magnetic fields. Even though hybridization of photons with electronic polarization to form exciton-polaritons has paved the way to a number of ground-breaking experiments in semiconductor microcavities, the neutral bosonic nature of these quasiparticles has severely limited their response to external gauge fields. Here, we demonstrate polariton acceleration by external electric and magnetic fields in the presence of nonperturbative coupling between polaritons and itinerant electrons, leading to formation of new quasiparticles termed polaron-polaritons. We identify the generation of electron density gradients by the applied fields to be primarily responsible for inducing a gradient in polariton energy, which in turn leads to acceleration along a direction determined by the applied fields. Remarkably, we also observe that different polarization components of the polaritons can be accelerated in opposite directions when the electrons are in $\nu =1$ integer quantum Hall state.

10 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Topological Photonics
• Photonic quantum technologies
• Quantum fluids of light
• Topological Polaritons
• Many-Body Theory of Trion Absorption Features in Two-Dimensional Semiconductors
• Electrically tunable artificial gauge potential for polaritons
• Anisotropic Optical Spin Hall Effect in Semiconductor Microcavities
• Drag effects in the system of electrons and microcavity polaritons
• Can we move photons?