Strong photon interactions from weakly interacting particles

Abstract

The hybridization of light and matter excitations in the form of polaritons has enabled major advances in understanding and controlling optical nonlinearities. Entering the quantum regime of strong interactions between individual photons has however remained challenging since the strength of achievable polariton interactions is typically limited by the available interactions in the material. Here, we investigate collisions between dark-state polaritons in three-level systems and discover a resonant process that yields effective interactions, which are much larger than the underlying interaction between their matter constituents. We systematically investigate the underlying mechanism and demonstrate a substantial enhancement of polariton interactions by several orders of magnitude. This suggests a promising approach to quantum nonlinear optics in a range of physical settings, from atomic gases to excitons in semiconductors and two-dimensional bilayer materials.

6 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (20)

• Quantum fluids of light
• Observation of Long-Lived Interlayer Excitons in Monolayer MoSe2-WSe2 Heterostructures
• Observation of Superfluidity of Polaritons in Semiconductor Microcavities
• Resonantly hybridised excitons in moiré superlattices in van der Waals heterostructures
• Repulsively bound atom pairs in an optical lattice
• Giant Rydberg Excitons in Cuprous Oxide
• Feshbach resonances in rubidium 87: Precision measurement and analysis
• Van der Waals Heterostructure Polaritons with moiré-Induced Nonlinearity
• Crystallization of strongly interacting photons in a nonlinear optical fiber
• Signatures of a dissipative phase transition in photon correlation measurements
• Polaritonic Feshbach Resonance
• Tunable Phases of Moiré Excitons in van der Waals Heterostructures
• Transition to a Bose-Einstein condensate of excitons at sub-Kelvin temperatures
• Decay of polarons and molecules in a strongly polarized Fermi gas
• Bose-Einstein condensation of stationary-light polaritons
• Giant Rydberg excitons in Cu${}_2$O probed by photoluminescence excitation spectroscopy
• Attractive and repulsive exciton-polariton interactions mediated by an electron gas
• Universal pair-polaritons in a strongly interacting Fermi gas
• Moiré-induced optical non-linearities: Single and multi-photon resonances
• Quantum confined Rydberg excitons in Cu${}_2$O nanoparticles

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Microscopic theory of polariton-polariton interactions
• Bichromatic four-wave mixing and quadrature-squeezing from biexcitons in atomically thin semiconductor microcavities
• Green's function approach to interacting lattice polaritons and optical nonlinearities in subwavelength arrays of quantum emitters
• Polaritons for testing the universality of an impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate
• Deterministic Shaping of Quantum Light Statistics