Origins and control of the polarization splitting in exciton-polaritons microwires

We report on the experimental investigation of the polarization-dependent energy splitting in the lower exciton-polariton branches of a 1D microcavity. The splitting observed for the lowest branch can reach up to 1 meV. It does not result from low temperature thermal constraints but from anisotropic mechanical internal strains induced by etching. Those strains remove the degeneracy both in the photonic ($delta E_{mathrm{ph}}$) and excitonic ($delta E_{mathrm{exc}}$) components of the polariton but also in the photon-exciton coupling ($deltaOmega$). Those three contributions are accurately infered from experimental data. It appears that the sign and magnitude of the polarization splitting as well as the linear polarization of the corresponding polariton eigenstates can be tuned through the bare exciton-photon detuning. Moreover, no dependence on the width of the wire (from 3 to 7 $mathrm{mu}$m) is observed. We propose a mechanical model explaining the universality of those observations paving the way to the engineering of polarization eigenstates in microwires exciton-polaritons.