No Arabic abstract
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.
Engineering non-linear hybrid light-matter states in tailored optical lattices is a central research strategy for the simulation of complex Hamiltonians. Excitons in atomically thin crystals are an ideal active medium for such purposes, since they couple strongly with light and bear the potential to harness giant non-linearities and interactions while presenting a simple sample-processing and room temperature operability. We demonstrate lattice polaritons, based on an open, high-quality optical cavity, with an imprinted photonic lattice strongly coupled to excitons in a WS$_{2}$ monolayer. We experimentally observe the emergence of the canonical band-structure of particles in a one-dimensional lattice at room temperature, and demonstrate frequency reconfigurability over a spectral window exceeding 12 meV, as well as the systematic variation of the nearest neighbour coupling, reflected by a tuneability in the bandwidth of the p-band polaritons by 7 meV. The technology presented in this work is a critical demonstration towards reconfigurable photonic emulators operated with non-linear photonic fluids, offering a simple experimental implementation and working at ambient conditions.
Observations of polariton condensation in semiconductor microcavities suggest that polaritons can be exploited as a novel type of laser with low input-power requirements. The low-excitation regime is approximately equivalent to thermal equilibrium, and a higher excitation results in more dominant nonequilibrium features. Although standard photon lasing has been experimentally observed in the high excitation regime, e-h pair binding can still remain even in the high-excitation regime theoretically. Therefore, the photoluminescence with a different photon lasing mechanism is predicted to be different from that with a standard photon lasing. In this paper, we report the temperature dependence of the change in photoluminescence with the excitation density. The second threshold behavior transited to the standard photon lasing is not measured at a low-temperature, high-excitation power regime. Our results suggest that there may still be an electron--hole pair at this regime to give a different photon lasing mechanism.
Two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) semiconductors provide a unique possibility to access the electronic valley degree of freedom using polarized light, opening the way to valley information transfer between distant systems. Excitons with a well-defined valley index (or valley pseudospin) as well as superpositions of the exciton valley states can be created with light having circular and linear polarization, respectively. However, the generated excitons have short lifetimes (ps) and are also subject to the electron-hole exchange interaction leading to fast relaxation of the valley pseudospin and coherence. Here we show that control of these processes can be gained by embedding a monolayer of WSe$_2$ in an optical microcavity, where part-light-part-matter exciton-polaritons are formed in the strong light-matter coupling regime. We demonstrate the optical initialization of the valley coherent polariton populations, exhibiting luminescence with a linear polarization degree up to 3 times higher than that of the excitons. We further control the evolution of the polariton valley coherence using a Faraday magnetic field to rotate the valley pseudospin by an angle defined by the exciton-cavity-mode detuning, which exceeds the rotation angle in the bare exciton. This work provides unique insight into the decoherence mechanisms in TMDs and demonstrates the potential for engineering the valley pseudospin dynamics in monolayer semiconductors embedded in photonic structures.
Layered materials can be assembled vertically to fabricate a new class of van der Waals (VDW) heterostructures a few atomic layers thick, compatible with a wide range of substrates and optoelectronic device geometries, enabling new strategies for control of light-matter coupling. Here, we incorporate molybdenum diselenide/boron nitride (MoSe$_2$/hBN) quantum wells (QWs) in a tunable optical microcavity. Part-light-part-matter polariton eigenstates are observed as a result of the strong coupling between MoSe$_2$ excitons and cavity photons, evidenced from a clear anticrossing between the neutral exciton and the cavity modes with a splitting of 20 meV for a single MoSe$_2$ monolayer QW, enhanced to 29 meV in MoSe$_2$/hBN/MoSe$_2$ double-QWs. The splitting at resonance provides an estimate of the exciton radiative lifetime of 0.4 ps. Our results pave the way for room temperature polaritonic devices based on multiple-QW VDW heterostructures, where polariton condensation and electrical polariton injection through the incorporation of graphene contacts may be realised.
Excitons, Coulomb bound electron-hole pairs, are composite bosons and their interactions in traditional semiconductors lead to condensation and light amplification. The much stronger Coulomb interaction in transition metal dichalcogenides such as WSe$_2$ monolayers combined with the presence of the valley degree of freedom is expected to provide new opportunities for controlling excitonic effects. But so far the bosonic character of exciton scattering processes remains largely unexplored in these two-dimensional (2D) materials. Here we show that scattering between B-excitons and A-excitons preferably happens within the same valley in momentum space. This leads to power dependent, negative polarization of the hot B-exciton emission. We use a selective upconversion technique for efficient generation of B-excitons in the presence of resonantly excited A-excitons at lower energy, we also observe the excited A-excitons state $2s$. Detuning of the continuous wave, low power laser excitation outside the A-exciton resonance (with a full width at half maximum of 4 meV) results in vanishing upconversion signal.