No Arabic abstract
In this thesis, we study two different aspects of many-particle physics. In the first part, we study the Bose-Einstein condensation of microcavity exciton-polaritons in different artificial lattices. Bose-Einstein condensation is a quantum phase transition, which allows the system to macroscopically occupy its ground state and develop coherence spontaneously. Often studied in microcavities, which are optical cavities that trap light at specific wavelengths, exciton-polaritons are a kind of quasiparticle arising from the strong coupling between quantum well excitons and cavity photons. By periodically aligning cavity pillars in different patterns, one can achieve different artificial lattice structures. With this setup, we apply the driven-dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equations to investigate the different consequences of the condensation by changing the pumping schemes and the design of the trapping potentials. Topics include multivalley condensation, phase selection and intermittency of exciton-polariton condensation, flat band condensation, and exciton-polariton topological insulators. In the second part of this thesis, we focus on the electron-scattering properties of a hybrid Bose-Fermi system. We consider a system consisting of a spatially separated two-dimensional electron gas layer and an exciton gas layer that interacts via Coulomb forces. We study the temperature dependence of the systems resistivity with this interlayer electron-exciton interaction and compare the results with the electron-phonon interaction.
Van der Waals materials and heterostructures manifesting strongly bound room temperature exciton states exhibit emergent physical phenomena and are of a great promise for optoelectronic applications. Here, we demonstrate that nanostructured multilayer transition metal dichalcogenides by themselves provide an ideal platform for excitation and control of excitonic modes, paving the way to exciton-photonics. Hence, we show that by patterning the TMDCs into nanoresonators, strong dispersion and avoided crossing of excitons and hybrid polaritons with interaction potentials exceeding 410 meV may be controlled with great precision. We further observe that inherently strong TMDC exciton absorption resonances may be completely suppressed due to excitation of hybrid photon states and their interference. Our work paves the way to a next generation of integrated exciton optoelectronic nano-devices and applications in light generation, computing, and sensing.
One of the recently established paradigms in the study of condensed matter physics is examining a systems behaviour in artificially constructed potentials. This allows one to obtain insight on a range of physical phenomena which may require non-feasible or hardly achievable experimental conditions. Here, we devise and implement an all-optical approach to a system of exciton-polaritons in semiconductor microcavities to load the particles into desired periodic potentials. We demonstrate a two-dimensional system of polariton condensates in two regimes - lattices of point scatterers, and confined states through non-resonant pumping with Gaussian beams arranged in a conventional, and an inverse Lieb configuration. We utilize energy tomography on the coherent polariton emission to reveal the intricate band structure of polaritonic Lieb lattices, and report on fully optically generated polariton condensation in S-, and dispersionless P-band states.
Exciton-polaritons are mixed light-matter quasiparticles. We have developed a statistical model describing stochastic exciton-photon transitions within a condensate of exciton polaritons. We show that the exciton-photon correlator depends on the hidden variable which characterizes the rate of exciton-photon transformations in the condensate. We discuss implications of this effect for the quantum statistics of photons emitted by polariton lasers.
We demonstrate control over light-matter coupling at room temperature combining a field effect transistor (FET) with a tuneable optical microcavity. Our microcavity FET comprises a monolayer tungsten disulfide WS$_2$ semiconductor which was transferred onto a hexagonal boron nitride flake that acts as a dielectric spacer in the microcavity, and as an electric insulator in the FET. In our tuneable system, strong coupling between excitons in the monolayer WS$_2$ and cavity photons can be tuned by controlling the cavity length, which we achieved with excellent stability, allowing us to choose from the second to the fifth order of the cavity modes. Once we achieve the strong coupling regime, we then modify the oscillator strength of excitons in the semiconductor material by modifying the free electron carrier density in the conduction band of the WS$_2$. This enables strong Coulomb repulsion between free electrons, which reduces the oscillator strength of excitons until the Rabi splitting completely disappears. We controlled the charge carrier density from 0 up to 3.2 $times$ 10$^{12}$ cm$^{-2}$, and over this range the Rabi splitting varies from a maximum value that depends on the cavity mode chosen, down to zero, so the system spans the strong to weak coupling regimes.
Strong spin-orbit coupling and inversion symmetry breaking in transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers yield the intriguing effects of valley-dependent optical selection rules. As such, it is possible to substantially polarize valley excitons with chiral light and furthermore create coherent superpositions of K and K- polarized states. Yet, at ambient conditions dephasing usually becomes too dominant, and valley coherence typically is not observable. Here, we demonstrate that valley coherence is, however, clearly observable for a single monolayer of WSe2, if it is strongly coupled to the optical mode of a high quality factor microcavity. The azimuthal vector, representing the phase of the valley coherent superposition, can be directly manipulated by applying magnetic fields, and furthermore, it sensibly reacts to the polarization anisotropy of the cavity which represents an artificial magnetic field. Our results are in qualitative and quantitative agreement with our model based on pseudospin rate equations, accounting for both effects of real and pseudo-magnetic fields.