Nonlinear Rydberg exciton-polaritons in Cu${}_2$O microcavities

Abstract

Rydberg excitons (analogues of Rydberg atoms in condensed matter systems) are highly excited bound electron-hole states with large Bohr radii. The interaction between them as well as exciton coupling to light may lead to strong optical nonlinearity, with applications in sensing and quantum information processing. Here, we achieve strong effective photon-photon interactions (Kerr-like optical nonlinearity) via the Rydberg blockade phenomenon and the hybridisation of excitons and photons forming polaritons in a Cu${}_2$O-filled microresonators. Under pulsed resonant excitation polariton resonance frequencies are renormalised due to the reduction of the photon-exciton coupling with increasing exciton density. Theoretical analysis shows that the Rydberg blockade plays a major role in the experimentally observed scaling of the polariton nonlinearity coefficient as $\propto n^{4.4\pm 1.8}$ for principal quantum numbers up to n = 7. Such high principal quantum numbers studied in a polariton system for the first time are essential for realisation of high Rydberg optical nonlinearities, which paves the way towards quantum optical applications and fundamental studies of strongly-correlated photonic (polaritonic) states in a solid state system.

References in corpus (7)

• Quantum fluids of light
• Exciton-polariton condensates
• Giant Rydberg Excitons in Cuprous Oxide
• A concise review of Rydberg atom based quantum computation and quantum simulation
• Enhanced metrology at the critical point of a many-body Rydberg atomic system
• Quantum and Nonlinear Optics in Strongly Interacting Atomic Ensembles
• High resolution nanosecond spectroscopy of even-parity Rydberg excitons in Cu${}_2$O

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Polaritonic Quantum Matter
• Many-Body Entanglement in Solid-State Emitters
• Polaritonic Machine Learning for Graph-based Data Analysis