Abstract:
Exciton-polaritons (polaritons) are quantum superpositionstates (quasi-particles) of optically confined photons and of electronicallyconfined excitations (excitons) in semiconductor quantum structures. Polaritonshave a very small effective mass and large coherent wavefunctions (owing to theirphotonic part) and can interact with each other and with external fields (viatheir excitonic part). For these reasons polaritons gather a lot of interest fromthe academic community. They are regarded as "interacting photons", atool which might be used: to engineer various types of quantum simulators, to explorefundamental physics of interacting quantum-degenerate systems, and to act asthe information carriers in a new type of fast and efficient logic circuitry.
In this talk I will present our progress in the study of excitonpolaritons in dielectric waveguides:
I will show that in the presence of an externally applied electricfield the excitons, and thus by proxy, the polaritons become dipolar and exhibitdipolar interactions which are much stronger then the local exchangeinteractions of the non-dipolar case. Iwill also show that the magnitude of these interactions as well as the energyof the polaritons can be both controlled by the magnitude of the electric field.Such strong and tunable interactions open newopportunities for realizing quantum circuitry based on exciton-polaritons.