Abstract
The interaction between cavity modes and optical transitions leads to new coupled light-matter states in which the energy is periodically exchanged between the matter states and the optical mode. Here we present experimental evidence of optical strong coupling between modes of individual sub-wavelength metamaterial nanocavities and engineered optical transitions in semiconductor heterostructures. We show that this behaviour is generic by extending the results from the mid-infrared (∼10 μm) to the near-infrared (∼1.5 μm). Using mid-infrared structures, we demonstrate that the light-matter coupling occurs at the single resonator level and with extremely small interaction volumes. We calculate a mode volume of 4.9 × 10 -4 (λ/n) 3 from which we infer that only ∼2,400 electrons per resonator participate in this energy exchange process.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 2882 |
| Journal | Nature Communications |
| Volume | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 29 2013 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
This work was performed, in part, at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, a US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences user facility. Portions of this work were supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program at Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.